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Professionals Ask Specific Localized Questions

The essence of this document is about making it super-easy to help you. Why? Because we are all professionals here, and learning to curry favor with other professionals is all about being the professional that is super-easy to help.

The opposite? You may observe that humans, generally, tend to be very poor at mind-reading.

This can be a real problem for the would-be-professional who is looking for some code assistance, asking for help by submitting a code repository with the generalized statement “I need some help.”

It happens more often than you might guess.

It’s all about “How To Replicate” the problem you need help with.

If a pro can replicate your problem in seconds (not minutes) he/she will always want to help because everybody loves to help others.

So your first objective is to make your problem super easy to replicate on their box, with their code.

For example: If you tell me you have a clearly identified problem with xyz-repo’s main method, I can have that on my box and running in probably less than 60 seconds, once I have a link to the repo.

Always mention exactly which file to look for the problem

Please use a very exact path from the root of the repository.

Always mention exactly which line in that file

“Line 27, where I am …”

Always explain exactly what you are expecting, and what is happening instead.

“I expected this to return a result of …”

“And instead, it is …”

Always provide a story of the process you already used to eliminate as many of the problems as possible.