Things should you do before asking for help with your code ๐Ÿ˜„

Things should you do before asking for help with your code ๐Ÿ˜„

ยท

3 min read

Hi ๐Ÿ‘‹!

As developers, we usually faced many errors, issues, or problems with our code or project every day, and it's common that we use great tools where we can write our problems and find some answers like Google, Stack Overflow, Communities in Slack, or Discord, etc.

But, if we can't find an answer ๐Ÿ˜ญ, we feel anxious to find the solution quickly and ask questions for many places to get some answer but without a plan (and we're disappointed ๐Ÿ˜ข), but this happens because we forget to consider many things before:

Try to figure out the solution yourself.

If there aren't answer on the Internet for your problem, you can try to analyze your code and other people before asking for help in some forum. You can apply techniques like debugging or see error logs (sometimes the answer is there ๐Ÿ˜„).

Replicate the problem.

When you have your code on your computer, it's difficult that other people can review your code and give some help or advice. Therefore, it's important that your code or project can be shared and executed easily. There are online code editors and platforms such as Codepen and Codesandbox.

Ask for help from a friend or coworker.

After you try to find some answer to your problem, replicate it, then you can ask for help from a friend. But, you should remember to talk about:

  • ๐Ÿ‘‰ What did you do?
  • ๐Ÿ‘‰ What things did you try?
  • ๐Ÿ‘‰ What is the result expected?

Why?, Because we don't want your coworker to lose time then we have to have an effective and short conversation.

Have patience.

The last option, write a question or report an issue in communities or directly to maintainers in a project, library, framework, tool, service, and so on.

The environment in technology is very collaborative and people will be willing to help you ๐Ÿ’›, but on another hand, there are moments where they can't help you immediately for many reasons that we can't control and have to understand and respect them. They need to research the cause of the problem, think, analyze it, ask their friends, colleagues, and so on. (It's difficult to wait for an answer I know, but eventually, you'll get some answer or next steps that you can follow).

Remember: the majority of the time, people who are working, contributing, or maintaining some repository. It's free, like volunteer work ๐Ÿ’ฏ. We should be thankful for their big work ๐Ÿ†.

I hope It was helpful for you. If you have some questions, advice, or comments related to this topic, you can leave them in the comments section.

See you until the next article. Good luck with your code ๐Ÿ˜„!

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