All Questions !=
07 Sep 2023
Essay Takeaways
Reading the essay written by Eric Raymond was very insightful. There were a lot of concepts I had never thought of that Eric was able to explain in detail. For example, he wrote about describing the goal and not the setup. This is very insightful because when asking questions in the past, I’ve explained more about how the problem happened instead of what I’m trying to fix. This ended up being more counter productive. I also enjoyed how Eric gave smart examples vs not smart examples. One scenario was “HELP! Video doesn’t work properly on my laptop!” No one would be willing to answer that. Overall, reading the essay set up a great background and I encourage others to read it as well.
Not so smart?
Trying to find a not-smart question on Stack Overflow was kind of hard. Every prompt that I tried to search for typically had a question with a lot of upvotes and a solid answer. I think this is because Stack Overflow does a good job in filtering out good questions from bad and users typically are asked to revise their questions if others need more clarification. From the reading, I see that a bad question would lack detail, have an unclear problem, and have no effort in trying to solve the problem beforehand. These features in a question would make it a waste of time for the other developers to actually try and help them out.
Importance to Software Engineering
Smart questions are super important for software engineers. In my past internship experiences and projects, I’ve encountered many problems when developing software or even setting up my configuration. I always copy and paste the error message into google and Stack Overflow is always the first thing that pops up. The solution works more than 50% of the time or puts me in a better position than I was in. One question I found was “How to get chosen class images from Imagenet?”. Basically, the user was trying to access individual classes to get images from Imagenet so that they could use it as an input. It seems like a lot of people had this question as well since it received 336 upvotes. It was a great question since it gave background, examples, working code, and then the actual question. Super detailed and to the point. The answer was very thorough and seemed to have answered the question well. They provided us with step by step instructions, images, and explanation of what was happening. This skill is super important because it allows developers to work with and learn from one another. A lot of developers typically have the same questions so posting them online is really good for visibility. Asking great questions also fosters a different kind of mindset when thinking about a problem. In trying to solve it yourself, you tend to think of different ways to solve the same problem.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49162455/how-to-get-chosen-class-images-from-imagenet