3 Tips to ask question on Stack Overflow the right way to get answers

Key Takeaways

hey friends welcome to one little coder in this video we are going to see how to ask questions on Stack Overflow again this video might look slightly silly to you if you are an experienced developer but if you are someone who is starting out as a programmer Stack Overflow is really a great place for you to get a lot of answers for the questions that you have but the problem with start off Louis I would like to explain it with some memes you would actually see a lot of Stack Overflow meme whenever you go online and especially this is one complaint that stock or flow usually gets that you ask a question and then someone is going to download it and then market that it is duplicate or someone is going to say that it has been already answered and a lot of things are so you can see this this meme says that someone tells you to go read the manual pages so this is all sort of problem that usually people face I mean now they start out putting questions on Stack Overflow but the problem is we should always understand that any community has a two-sided problem the problem is not only with the community which answers the question it is also the problem sometimes with the people who ask question so rather than blaming someone it is always better for us to improve our shil because we are at the end who we need answer on no one else is going to be at loss of if I am not getting an answer right so it's always better for me to optimize the way I ask question so that someone is going to answer so to start with first let us pick a sample or language for example in this case if I want to ask a question about Python the first important thing for me to do is I have to check how other questions are asked that have already answers for example let's take the latest one so someone has posted a question or post on file image search block and this this is a question the question I mean you can understand when you look at this question start Warfel as a place where you have to ask programming related question and it is usually advised that you try out something and then you explain what you have tried out and then you ask for help you don't ask for questions like this and we are definitely sure that someone is going to down this and then close this question so now we just had a look at tom how not to ask a question so let's let's also look at another question which is probably it has got two downwards so again we can have a look at this question so someone has said that from model this thing this is the error that I'm getting and there is no description at all in this entire thing so now someone is it just says how do I get rid of tensorflow input error so this is the question so no one no one gives some um whatever it is right about the error that you are getting because people want this to be like a knowledge base for someone who comes back in the future also so that is the thing so now that we have seen how not to ask questions so let us do a small checklist of how to ask question so the first and foremost thing that you need to know before asking question is how to create a minimal reproducible example it is either called minimal reproducible example or it is also known as minimum working example MWe or M I so what is it so a minimum reproducible example is where you are asking a question with something that you have shared and that thing also enables others to answer your question so for example let's go to something that was asked for some time back and then see a question that does already have some answer so let's pick something which I saw someone has already Marcus answered okay so this this has so when you go here you can actually see that someone has said that this is the thing that I am doing this is the output that it is give giving and how do I do this thing and this is not exactly a minimum reproducible example but it at least gives someone an ability to check and there are a lot of other communities for example if you go to our so you would also see there is a page that will share how to ask a question so you can actually go to the most active section and then you can see how to ask so for example in this case someone has done this thing someone has done this and then how do I do this thing and we see answers of different shots for example the question was asked 26 minutes ago and someone has answered 14 minutes ago within within a small time frame of 12 minutes so the most important thing for you to understand this for the particular language or question that you're going to ask how to create a minimum reproducible example which should usually have these these things for example first it should be minimal very small second it should be reproducible someone has someone should be able to reproduce what you are going to ask so for example if you're going to ask a question and find us so let's go to Ponder's and then see if you have a - related question then you you should probably see see how it has been asked so you know that there is a dataset they are using so maybe you have a data set in your organization that you cannot share it with someone so you pick some inbuilt data set and then do something and then try to say what is the error that you are getting and then you ask for the question and then someone is going to answer you so this is how you should ask a question with minimum reproducible example which is minimal and it also helps someone run the code reproducible and it explains the problem what you have tried out so this is the first thing the second thing is even after this if you have a question before even you post the question first thing you have to check is whether the question has been already answered because you don't want to bombard the community with the same question again and again for example if you have to ask can I do a wide data frame - a long data frame using Fonda's then search for it pandas long too wide and see you have question find us long to it find us long to it find us long to ID and us long to it and pandas long to white she have got so many questions for the same thing so you don't want to be that person who is going to again out the same thing and stop our flow may be your problem is slightly different so it is always good to go see what what kind of answers people have already given try it out for your use case and if it is not available then you ask a question but the most important thing is it is very important for you to not ask the same question and and again because someone is definitely going to say this is the duplicate of this like this and they're going to close this question so it's very important to find out whether it is not part of some other question that has been already answered the other meaning that we saw is that someone is going to ask you to check the manual it is also another good habit for example if you want to know simply how to pee what find us data frame I mean you should not first of all ask a question on Stack Overflow it is better to ask must check the manual and then if you cannot do that then go explain the same thing with minimum reproducible example and then ask the question so that way your question becomes very specific narrow ish it's not going to be like a theoretical question on this programming platform so you have other platforms like if you have a data science question you can go to cross validated there are other places where you can ask those questions but given this particular platform is only for programming you don't tend to ask these kind of questions so that is always good so for the things that we saw you need to know how to do a minimum reproducible example unity Sigma the question has been already answered the other thing is you go to a place you go to this this answer section and see the questions that were asked before that were answered so the questions that are similar to your problem and the way it was asked and the way it was answered so if you do this a little bit of work then it is always better because you can now be very sure that someone is going to answer your question so this is the example that we saw let's look at another example so someone has said that this is my data frame how can I send this using email so even though there is no minimum reproducible example someone has actually said that okay this is what I want this is how my output I want and this is what I have tried so this shows the community that okay you have made your best efforts even though this could be easily available on some documentation or something but this you have made your best efforts and you're sharing it with the community that this is exactly what you want this is what you have tried and this comes out so this you could have a different question you could do you could be a different formatting so when you look at this question so you know how to ask this kind of exact question that could get you an answer because ultimately our objective is to get answer not to do anything else so these are main three tips so first minimum reproducible example second oneness or look for duplication and then the third one is look for a similar question that has been already answered or and then try to ask a question similar to that so these three tips will help you make your questions stay and then get answered so that you can get all your programming problems and also I do not deny that our core flow has some problem with respect to being sometimes rude to your questions or I'm not saying that these memes or all false but the point I'm trying to make us you are the one who wants the answer there is no point in blaming someone or making fun of someone if you need answer you have to definitely put your effort and asking the right question so that your question could be answered I hope this video this meta video was quite helpful and if you have any question please put put it in the comment section and if you have any feedback also please let me know in the comment section and if you have not subscribed please subscribe to this channel so that it helps me stay motivated and thank you so much for listening to this video and I'll see you in the next one