Everyday there are many new questions that my come up when doing software developement and many have already been solved. This is one of the reasons for StackOverFlow and is a very helpful tool that everyone can use to help them with problems that may already be solved. Since everyone does have access to StackOverFlow many people don’t know how to use it correctly so they can ask and recieve quality questions and answers. This gives the many different readers valuablebackground information they need on the problem or may motivate them to try the problem. This is the reason Eric Raymond gave us the guidelines to follow so people on the exchange can have more structured information to follow. It is the small things that can really add up to help drive a question towards a well made answer with a strong community backing.
While looking for a question in StackOverFlow I stumbled upon one that is titled “React To Do list not updating. It was just asked on the day of writing this essay and already has couple answers. The reason for this is because it goes straight to the problem in question, has all code needed to back up his question enough so that anyone can jump in and try to solve the problem, and in the end states the specific areas of things he tried to solve and where the problem most likely originates from. It seems as if he already looked up the problem before and can’t seem to figure out an error in a specific part of code. This was stated on the guidelines also to make sure you are asking the right questions which I think the user has because they tried to narrow it down to the possible causes for the error. They were already able to get 2 responses because of this and 30+ people already viewed the question in the first day posted.
On the opposite end there are questions that are not as well put together because they don’t cover many of the points in how to ask smart questions. From the start the question that was asked is very vague and only has small snipets of code to be used. This was in a question called I want to use jquery in react. In the question it doesn’t seem like there is much background show in them trying the problem much and they put “how can I do it?” in the end. One of the ways to get better answers is to ask a question that people can understand and have an easy time jumping into the question. This is shown to not be that useful because the person that commented on the subject had to post a big chunk of code and it’s like the just gave them the answer. This is not forming a smart question because it makes people not want to read it if they are going to have to do most of the work when it is another person asking for the help. It also hasrecieved 2 down votes indicating that it was not structured in a very easy to answer question.
These are the links if needed for further reference. StackOverFlow Link 1 StackOverFlow Link 2