One of the most important things you can learn as a software developer is how to find your own answers. When you are working with unfamiliar technologies, though, sometimes that is hard, and you have to ask questions.
However, you should make sure you have done everything you can to find the answer yourself, and that you ask good questions without wasting the time of people who can help you. Because if you do waste people's time, they won't want to continue helping you.
Here are some references that will help teach you how to find your own answers, and to ask good questions if you cannot find your own answer.
Often, you will find that by going through the process of preparing a good question with these steps, you will find the answer on your own! Following these processes makes you focus on the problem in a different way. This happens to me all the time!
One of the first ways you can start learning this important skill is to read through ALL of the following articles! It will take you some time, but it will be worthwhile in helping you learn to not waste other people's time.
Some of these articles are nice and friendly, others are more blunt and even a little mean. And you will see that they sometimes give repeated, outdated, or even contradictory information. These things are also true of the types of people that you will encounter when asking for help!
However, reading them all and applying the processes and advice they contain is guaranteed to make you a better, more efficient, and more successful engineer/developer/coder/hacker.
- https://learnjsthehardway.com/blog/03-how-to-ask-for-help
- https://jvns.ca/blog/good-questions/
- https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask
- http://sscce.org/
- https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example
- https://web.archive.org/web/20091120152552/www.slash7.com/pages/vampires
- http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html