One of the most frustrating thing about coding is when your code doesn’t work and you have no choice, but to ask. StackOverflow is one of the most helpful communities out there for developers. If you have any questions about coding, you could probably go here and seek help. However, the quality of the answers you will receive will be completely dependent on your question.
In an article by Eric Steven Raymond, “How To Ask Questions The Smart Way”, he gives us guidelines on how to properly ask questions. The quality of the question that you ask can greatly impact the speed and the quality of answers you will receive. Here is an example of a bad question. The question does not give any context or details on what the problem is or what they are trying to do and expects the reader to take a look at the code and figure it out themself.
This is an example of a smart question. The asker gives a lot of information on what they are trying to do and what they have tried to fix it. They also thought about what could be going wrong giving the reader as much information as possible to help them solve the problem. The difference between the two questions is that one got answers and the other got removed for lacking details. By following the guidelines set by Raymond, not only will you saving your own time, you will also be saving time for the person helping you and you would be getting faster solution to your problems.