E11: Reflect on smart questions
The summary of this homework said that communication is one of the most important things for software enginnering and developing, especially, asking questions in a smart way is the point that should be considered in particular depth and I think it is necessary for success. Eric Raymond’s essay, “How to Ask Questions the Smart Way,” is also mentioned “In the world of hackers, the kind of answers you get to your technical questions depends as much on the way you ask the questions as on the difficulty of developing the answer. This guide will teach you how to ask questions in a way more likely to get you a satisfactory answer.”. So this essay shows examples of smart and not smart questions from StackOverflow and compares the results, positive and negative.
In my opinion, it is necessary to think what question fits my problems to ask the smart question. In Raymond’s essay, there is a lot of outline before we ask questions on the internet. I will pick some requirements that I think are very important and introduce them. First, He said we need to try to find an answer before asaking. It says There are many opportunities around us to look into the problems, like Related books and websites. Then next, we need to think about the place where we ask the questions. There are many forums on the internet and the question might not fit in the forum. In addition, we also think about what level the question is. If you suddenly ask a rudimentary question in a high-level conversation, the topic will be diverted. So we care about the question level. The following is an example of what I think is a smart question.
The good point is It put the code on it and explains the situation in detail like what kind of errors happened and what he was doing to solve them. And this question has many views and answers collected, in other words, it is easy to understand and get answers to.
In contrast, I think this question is not smart
It is also asked with the situation that is faced, I don’t have knowledge in this topic, however the code shows by photo and is very hard to see. In addition, It is tagged for very few people. So the question is not getting the answer.
In conclusion, the art of asking smart questions is a crucial skill for software engineers. The analysis of StackOverflow examples underscores the impact of effective communication on the outcomes of assistance sought within the developer community. By following Eric Raymond’s guidelines and understanding the nuances of smart questioning, software engineers can optimize their interactions, fostering a collaborative and efficient problem-solving environment. I learned the importance of clear, well-researched inquiries for smart questions in this essay.