Rock Solid - Smart Questions
24 Jan 2019
Rock Solid Questioning
“There are no such things as dumb questions.” Though this may be true, there certainly are better and “smarter” questions compared to those. These certain principles are introduced in Eric Steven Raymond’s “How to Ask Questions the Smart Way”. As a software engineer, we always shall be conflicted with debugging errors within our code. When that happens, we always look toward others to assist us in our times of troubles. With smart questions, both parties, the questioner and the answerer, can productively and efficiently collaborate in search for a solution. The read, though long, was very informative in teaching various ways to format questions properly as well as steps to follow in order to ask questions properly. We should all strive to ask effective “smart” questions in order to improve as a successful software engineer!
Coarse Sand Example
In the following link, the user did not follow the principles by Raymond; it definitely shows when the question was rated a -3 votes. This question states almost no information about their progress/work and a clickable link to a picture of their code regarding their question about un-checking the call firebaselistadapter using listview in the firebase UI. First of all, the questioner did not include much background to their approach in solving the problem, providing no information that tells about their system and/or progress towards a solution. In addition, they have included a picture to a piece of code that displayed their error; in order to make it easier on the experts answering the question, the person could have formatted the code onto the StackOverflow website to make it readable and faster to access. Due to this poorly formatted question, the post has already received three down votes thus far.
In addition, as you can see from the link below, the question has been removed from StackOverflow as it was not to standard.
Shining Diamond Example
In this following example, the question has been thoroughly organized in a “smart” questioning manner as discussed in Raymond’s paper. The question provided its question in the title of the posting, two formatted code examples, as well as a bullet-point list of thoughts regarding their question why it is faster to process a sorted array rather than an unsorted array. For starters, the header is very direct and meaningful, quickly addressing the issue that this user has. Furthermore, they have included two types of examples that showcases their progress while working through the problem, displaying the user’s personal trials in attempting to solve the issue. With that information included, other individuals can see how the user is willing to think and do the research before asking, not being a so-called “loser” as stated in Raymond’s report. Consequently because of the “smartness” from this question, the user was able to receive a wide breadth of replies over time.