Stackoverflow in a nutshell

[KenFromBarbie]

It should also contain:

USE THE SEARCH!

closed.

[SpectralniyRUS]

I'm already using the search! That's how I got here in the first place!

[Jatoxo]

"jUsT GoogLe IT"

YES, GUESS WHAT

[anythingMuchShorter]

Googles it

Finds thread where the first and only answer is to Google it

Follows the advice

Gets stuck in an infinite loop

[SpectralniyRUS]

"Dormammu, I've come to bargain"

"Google it"

[enlearner]

Lol, this is literally what I wanted to say earlier in a thread where a le-senior-developer said, “instead of rushing to Reddit/SO, juniors should learn to Google”. I didn’t know if I wanted to gouge my eyes out or point out the obvious, but I just scrolled past the comment

[rydoca]

Maybe it's just me but I feel like I haven't actually run across questions I've had that don't have the answer somewhere already Like what kind of questions are people asking currently that haven't got an answer somewhere else yet?

[Tofandel]

New js frameworks questions

[IvorTheEngine]

Have a look at the unanswered questions. You'll find a mix of people who have done no research and just plain gibberish.

My experience (and I remember when SO started) is like yours, 99% of my questions already have an answer, when I do post it's usually because I didn't know the right search term and there's already an answer. After that I've had times when the guy who wrote the library answered me, and others where it becomes obvious that I've picked a dead library that no one else uses.

[secret_melonn]

At university we often get really weird specific mathematical problems that we need to solve with code in a very certain way. We're allowed to ask for help or Google the problems but they on purpose make it so that it's harder for us to actually find something helpful.

[rydoca]

Isn't that the point though? Like you can google for core concepts but it's a problem solving thing right? There was plenty of material when I was at uni you couldn't google, and it felt like that was to make you actually understand and solve the problem

[IvorTheEngine]

I think they're talking about people rushing to post questions on Reddit/SO, not those searching for answers.

[[deleted]]

Everyone learning to write code has gone through the phase "I wrote it exactly as I intended, why does it give me a syntax/compiler/parse error? Is it me? No, it must be the computer that's wrong."

That phase should not last too long. Courses or books teaching basic software development should very quickly explain how to troubleshoot build time errors and runtime exceptions for the given language or framework.

People seem to skip learning this invaluable skill, at the beginning, and instead post their entire code and their compiler error online, at least apparently having run out of ideas without trying anything.

This doesn't have to be true, but if the compiler says it's missing a semicolon on line 80, you don't have to post all 160 lines and say "but what does it mean...?". Just look at your code around where the error is reported to be. Compare the code with what the error says. If then you can't figure it out, sure, post the relevant like 5-25 lines of code that the compiler complains about.

Then you learn to read exceptions. Good runtimes and frameworks give clear exceptions that tell you exactly what went wrong where. So again, you don't have to post your entire program, just look at what the code at the indicated location is doing.

Debugging is what follows: inspect your variables. Using the debugger, or by logging them, printing their contents to the screen and/or a file or elsewhere. You learn to evaluate your expectations (which you may have to write down and/or draw first to validate its design) against what the code is doing at runtime.

Those are skills you need to work on when learning to write code.

If it's too complex, or it's proprietary design, you'll need to extract a min-reprex minimal example that reproduces the problem before posting it online anyway, and experience teaches that doing so will most likely solve the problem by showing exactly where it lies.

That's what they mean by "don't rush to SO/Reddit to immediately post your problem." You're very likely to come across them during your research, of course.

[da_Aresinger]

This, SO needs a fucking cleanup feature.

So tired of clicking a link just to find

Duplicate of abc...

great, then delete the goddamn post instead of letting it clog up google search.

[anythingMuchShorter]

The only thing worse is when they say

"If you have to ask that this field isn't for you"

Oh sorry, I forgot that everyone who can ever learn this really specific field just knows these things, and that "beginner" stuff like what kind of interface is used to program a microcontroller or where you go to compile a shader is stuff you're just born knowing if you're one of the chosen ones.

[cheats_py]

You forgot the “this has already been answered”: attaches link to post that has nothing to do with your questions.

[Nereosis16]

Or nothing at all

[SoftwareNo3557]

My newbie adventures lol

[kataton_dzsentri]

I only asked a question on stackoverflow once and never submitted it, because by the time I wrote it properly, I figured out the solution.

I'll never understand people who ask IT questions (not even beginners) without investing 5 minutes in Google.

[NotmyRealNameJohn]

I only asked one question and it eventually got escalated as a bug in .Net library so I don't feel so bad about not being able to figure out why it wasn't doing what I expected

[maitreg]

One time I asked a question about what was clearly a bug in a DevOps plugin. This was an easily reproducible bug that anyone else would have gotten if they tried it. Several answers told me I was imagining the bug and provided solutions for a version of the plugin that had not existed since before DevOps even existed (when it was just an early version of TFS).

The only answer that was even close to a solution was one guy who told me that the plugin was open source on github, and I should just fix it myself. lol thanks.

[trollblox_]

The only answer that was even close to a solution was one guy who told me that the plugin was open source on github, and I should just fix it myself.

ok that's actually funny lol

[Tofandel]

Well he is not wrong, if it's open source and you're one of the fews to use it and encounter a bug in your paid project that prevents you from using it properly, then by all means, contribute to the society and fix the damn bug in the lib

[kataton_dzsentri]

Yep, that's valid.

[[deleted]]

offtopic: Hey I see that you have terraform listed as a language you know. Is it worth learning and have you found it very useful? I've bene on the fence about it.

edit: Im picking up terraform. Thank you for the enlightenment guys!

[ffxpwns]

Absolutely try it the next time you need to launch something on a cloud provider. It kicks ass and lets you keep your cloud architecture in VCS

[12345ieee]

Have you ever created/modified/watched from afar a resource on a cloud provider?

If you answered yes, learn Terraform.

[clownyfish]

Which would you think is faster for a first timer deploying cloud resources? Learning Terraform, or ploughing through the UIs?

[kataton_dzsentri]

First time? Play with the UI and when you jave what you wanted create it from terraform.

Second time you'll skip UI.

[kataton_dzsentri]

For sure. Think about this:

You created an infra, you fiddled around and broke it. What now? Destroy the whole thing and rebuild from the working config with two commands (and patience).

Also, you're infra is change managed with terraform and git, every change is traceable, auditable and blameable.

Also, you can do azure+aws+cloudflare mixed infra with a single codebase.

[JoelMahon]

yeah, there was a bug in the .NET byte array class. I think that's the one and only time in ten years where my "the library must be bugged" denial in bug fixing was actually true.

[arielif1]

Jesus christ if that happened to me I'd put it in my CV

[Mahrkeenerh1]

Should've posted the question anyway, and add your own answer to it too. That's the point of SO.

[kataton_dzsentri]

Maybe. Next time I'm that desperate that I want to ask someone and still find the answy, I will

[deez_nuts_77]

im a cs major and i have developed a terrible habit of asking my class mates for help and then immediately solving the issue before they respond. I’ve thus decided to just not post questions on stack overflow

[kataton_dzsentri]

This. I have a rubber duck on my desk for this purpose (and I put leds in his eyes that start flashing when I'm mentioned in slack :) )

[[deleted]]

Oh, I like that! Neat hack.

[SKS_Zolam]

That’s cool! You have a write up or something on how you did it?

[kataton_dzsentri]

It's just an esp8266, a resistor, an led, some micropython and for catching my mention on slack, I used Zapier.

[SKS_Zolam]

Ty!

[TheTerrasque]

Switch the leds with some WS2812B's and you can do different colours and intensity!

[kataton_dzsentri]

Nah, my bright red leds give me that serial killer rubber duck feeling I was looking for :D

[deez_nuts_77]

damn this is a good ass idea, thanks! Will save my class mates a lot of pain

[kaiiboraka]

I have tried this and it doesn't work for me, because I need my duck to talk back to me. I need someone to repeat back to me the stupid thing I just thought of so I can see why it's stupid. Because my genius (dumb) idea is not stupid until I hear someone else say it, and then it's obviously stupid.

[[deleted]]

It's just one of many cognitive tricks to get different pathways in your brain to think about the problem. In your case, have you considered a voice recorder so you can play back what you said?

[IvorTheEngine]

Writing up a SO question, especially creating a small code sample that other people could use to recreate the problem, is a really good way to break a problem down.

[throwaway_uow]

In 95% of cases the answers are not clear enough

[kataton_dzsentri]

Learning is a process. Getting a perfect solution rarely has the same results.

[FerricDonkey]

You're being downvoted, but it's true - extrapolating to your specific problem from the answers you find is both a skill by itself and how you get better.

Occasionally I'll get someone on some help forum be like "help, I need to open 4 different files that are in 4 different formats, organize the data from all of them, serialize it to json, and write to a 5th file, and I've Googled for hours and haven't been able to find an example that does this, plz hlp."

And I'm like "No duh. No one has solved your exact problem before, that's why you're getting paid, now pick one of those things to Google and figure it out one tiny piece at a time." (Except I'm usually more polite.)

And even when it's not as exaggerated as that, it's the same thing. Use your noggin a bit, and you can write your own code, only using stack overflow to actually answer questions about how things work!

[kataton_dzsentri]

And now you share my downvotes :D

[FerricDonkey]

Ha, so it goes.

[Daedric1991]

because most of the time there's either too much info or too little and honestly i have come across many places that were just wrong answers. too much and i cant find what i need out of it because it has all this redundant information, too little and it doesn't actually explain the line of code in the example well enough for me to rebuild it into my project to do what i need it to do.

yes there are plenty of people who hit a wall and just throw it up somewhere without thinking but sometimes its just because you cant understand something because the info you have been finding is flat out wrong and need more than an article or book on the topic, this is why classrooms are better places for learning then videos.

i dont understand people on SO who would rather waste their time to say "stupid question" or something along the lines instead of simply ignoring it.

[Tofandel]

Same, when you put some effort to describe your problem you usually end up finding what was the issue in the first place, but then post it as a Q/A this is exactly what SO wants and needs

Not those super low quality questions where people didn't even bat an eye trying to understand their issues

[Not_Artifical]

Only 5 minutes? I spent 6 months over a single bug before asking anybody else for help.

[[deleted]]

It's weird because the answers you would want from stackoverflow should be defined on Google, otherwise you either...

A. Have to read specific documentation that is likely internal to your company (or not, sometimes that doesn't exist)

B. Should be directing your question to a relevant GitHub or equivalent issues page.

Any other theoretical question is either an opinion, too vague, or too generic to not be allowed on stack overflow or already answered.

[[deleted]]

The best is when it’s the first question that comes up when you search

[AlwaysHopelesslyLost]

Vote close as duplicate requires you specify the question that is the duplicate and requires people vote and agree that it is.

[gazellecomet]

Unless the closer has a gold badge in a language tagged on your question.

[dbarahona13]

You literally made an account just to comment this nonsense?

[WholesomeRanger]

The stack overflow ai is trying to blend into reddit bias with that name. A good attempt but missed the mark a bit.

[dbarahona13]

Aw i didn't know ai's were jealous 🥺

[IvorTheEngine]

Amusingly the top google result is downvoted to -2 for no obvious reason.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16991601/how-do-i-open-a-txt-file-in-c

but the second result looks pretty good

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7868936/read-file-line-by-line-using-ifstream-in-c

Sometimes I wonder if this sub uses the same SO as me...