Asking Smart Questions
07 Sep 2018
Asking smart questions is an important skill to have for the savvy programmer. It is equally as important to recognize when someone is asking a smart question. One of the questions I found on stack overflow that I would consider I smart question was posted by someone who was having trouble with GitHub commits. Their title was clear and concise on what their issue was. There are a few grammatical errors in the individual’s post but overall this person explains their problem, goes into why and what they’re trying to fix and the issue that they are running into. This sounds like a fairly common problem but is definitely not something that is intuitive. This individual is running into merge conflicts because someone along the line removed all of their changes. Along with this, this individual does not want to have to revert everyone else’s contributions as there have been many changes since the commit occurred. By clearly stating the problem, this person was able to quickly and concisely receive an answer and many other answers as well that go into further detail in case the issue comes up for others. An example I found of a non-smart question is from someone who merely posted their code and asked for help. They were not clear about what they have tried to do to fix their problem, they did not ask in a way that was respectful using poor grammar, spelling, and are merely asking for help selfishly. This is reflected in the number of replies as there is only one short reply that corrects their small syntax error. This is clearly a non-smart question as this question is only helping this one person and probably not going to be that useful of a topic for others to see. Going through this process of looking for preparing proper questions opens my eyes to how important it is when asking for help to be respectful of the time and effort of others. Clearly, the amount of effort you can show to others that you have truly attempted to put in your own work on a problem, the greater it will reflect on the individual asking the question. The answers of the question will also see that the individual is respecting their time and will put in their own effort to help someone who is just a little lost.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52176834/how-to-re-commit-a-past-commit-if-someone-overwrote-my-commit
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52231753/why-is-this-coin-flipper-code-always-flipping-heads