Reflections
Reflections
January 8, 2015
After analyzing some questions people asked on Google+ and StackOverflow communities, some of them were definitely better than others. The ones that didn't get as many responses seemed to be very vague and were not to the point. There were also some questions that provided way too much irrelevant information. I just want to get to the point. The good questions often had a distinguished title that had a good summary of the problem. The first paragraph would describe some brief background of the overall goal and what they had tried before. I believe a good question requires that you be able to describe specifically what you're trying to attain. A brief code snippet of the problematic code is very beneficial to help diagnose the problem. The keyword here is brief. You don't want the others to look through a hundred lines of code, that work is up to the person asking for help. Try to frame the question so that if you were trying to answer your own question, you would understand it as an outsider.
Asking questions in person is a little bit different than asking for help online. Because there is live person answering the question, it's important to remember to let that person answer the question fully and not interrupt them. Giving them a moment of silence after they give their first response usually allows them to divulge more into their answer due to the nature of wanting to fill in the silence. When you ask your initial question, be sure it's an open ended question. Don't ask yes or no questions. Open ended questions allow for more detail. Respond with follow up questions that question how they got to that answer or why they thought that way, basically asking for more detail. Knowing how to ask questions and asking them often will help you learn more efficiently in school and also in life. It's always good to question the unknown and ask why. This will definitely help me as I'm about to embark in a crazy 9 week web development bootcamp at DBC.
