Asking questions the smart way allows you to grow as a software engineer. Using Open Source Software can give you the opportunity to ask questions and get help from other software developers. However, there is a smart way to ask questions and if that question needs to be posted. In order to grow as a software engineer, you need to first do your own research and try to find the answer for your problem. If it’s a common question, then the answer is likely posted somewhere and you can save yourself from “snarky” answers or no answers at all. After searching and looking through textbooks, if the answer is not found then you can go ahead and turn towards Open Source Software. Asking questions online can be very helpful, especially if you ask it properly. Don’t post a vague question that may need to be further explained. Looking on OpenStock, I was able to find two examples of a smart question and a less smart question.
The smart question I found asked about operating in javascript. The operator is !! and the person asking the question has not seen it before and was asking what it does. The user also included the line of code so that other users can see what they are referring to.
Here is the link to the Smart Question.
The less smart question I found also got an answer but not as many as the smart question. The question was asking what a NullReferenceException is. The user did not really explain the code and only included the NullReferenceException and how it was unhandled and asked how to fix it. The question was able to be answered but there were not as many answers and some did not go into great detail, some answers just told the user how to fix the exception. I would consider this a less smart question because the question could have been answered with a simple google search.
In order to become a smart software engineer, you have to take the initiative and try to figure out the problem yourself or ask questions a smart way so you can get the best answer as well as learn and grow from that answer.
Here is the link to the Less Smart Question.