Seek Wisely and You Shall Find
25 Jan 2024
Watch out for the rabbit hole
Utilizing online resources can offer a bounty of insight, and information to what it is you hope to know. For any student looking for guidance, or a software developer meeting his wits end on a project. There may be an existing answer, or others within an online community who are willing to share what they know, or ready to start a discussion that can provide a possible solution for all to benefit. Because of the saturation of information in pages and opinions spread across the internet. Searching for answers can make the experience feel like a clustered and tangled web that leaves you more confused than when you started. Yet there is hope in searching for what it is you seek to find. Which starts with asking smart questions that can lead to an effective learning experience.
Know what you’re asking for
Through scrolling submitted questions on stackoverflow.com (an online community whose mission is “Empowering the world to develop technology through collective knowledge”). I’ve recognized several types of questions considered favorable, and those that were least considered to be worth the time for a response. Of the (current) roughly 24 million questions posted on StackOverFlow, questions are voted up, or voted down. Of the less purposeful questions I pulled to review, some were rapidly receiving negative votes then disappeared from the list, and Others were marked as closed because they did not categorize as on-topic questions, or needed to be improved. Which goes to show that fishing for answers without providing adequate detail will not give you the response you’re looking for. Proving that knowledge is earned through the effort we put in toward understanding it.
Work Smarter
Highly voted questions that receive thousands of views stick around on the thread becoming knowledge of the collective. I’ve noticed that some questions which gain importance are not always most clear at first, yet the user does provide enough relevant context within the body of their post to describe the question they hope to enter into discussion. These “smart” questions lead the potential respondents to narrow their effort in hopes of providing meaningful input. They are open-ended questions with examples of previous work, and diagnostic steps made in effort to define and solve the problem. An example of this is from a user who had asked to understand “use strict;” in JavaScript after receiving an error within a program. Though the question wasn’t to directly find a solution, which the user was able to do, yet it was to find an explanation of the purpose of the statement after not being able to find sufficient information about it online. The development of the post enabled other users to provide direct answers to help with recognizing that the “use strict;” can be utilized for throwing exceptions. Aside from providing solutions, productive communication within an online community can be helpful in understanding programming languages at different levels as students, and developers progress in their learning and career.