How to Ask Questions on Stack Overflow
and not die trying
Presented by Oded Coster
@OdedCoster
.NET South West meetup - May 21st 2015
Who am I?
- Early user of Stack Overflow (August 2008)
- Developer on the Stack Exchange Q&A team
Overview
- Why should we ask good questions?
- How do we ask such questions?
- Stack Overflow specific advice
Why ask good questions?
Someone might have the answer
Why ask good questions?
It can clarify the problem to yourself
AKA Rubber duck debugging
Research your problem
- Official documentation
- Tests and experiments
- Google
- Stack Overflow search
Take your time
- Read and re-read your question
- Short, descriptive title
- Pertinent tags
- Ensure the whole makes sense
- Once posted, stay around and respond to comments
Make the question easy to answer
- Show your research, explain what you tried
- Ask about the problem, not your attempted solution
- Include code that shows the problem
- Limited scope - should be answerable in a few paragraphs
- Very broad questions are bad
Keep those who answer in mind
- Volunteers that are giving their time and expertise
- Strangers on the Internet
- From around the world
- Mostly at their place of work
Details that matter
- Don't forget to actually ask a question
- and just one question
- Check your grammar and spelling
- Be polite, but no salutations
- Don't include unnecessary details
- Formatting - learn Markdown
Bad Question
Bad Question
Good Question
Recap
- Asking good questions matters
- Take your time to ask
- Make it easy to answer
- Be mindful who you are asking help from