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RehanSaeed
[Comment] Writing Code while Asleep
Great article as ever rehan! I've been thinking for a while of getting more involved in StackOverflow and GitHub and this has persuaded me.
It's amazing how quickly you can sometimes get answers to your questions using Stack Overflow too, the fastest I've seen is literally 30 seconds!
That is certainly true, and it is a great aspect of SO. However, I feel like your post overall that this sentence in particular neglects the biggest disadvantage of SO, which is the difficulty in creating a good question. Communication is hard, written communication is harder, and creating a minimal working example is harder still. (That link is to Wikipedia, which has four exellect links in its External Links section.)
...they need to learn to use Stack Overflow just like everybody else, so that's where I've started pointing them lately.
Do you have a specific phrase you use to communicate this? I was thinking that the following phrase might work well.
I would be better able to help you if you posted your question on StackOverflow. Can you post your question there and then reply to me with the link to your post?
@TysonMN Most people don't even post a question, so getting them to think about a minimal working example is an afterthought. Doing so would make a nice follow up post.
Strangely, I haven't received as many requests for help recently as in past years. Perhaps because I've blogged a bit less or more people have learned about Stack Overflow, so I don't really have a good phrase I keep handy.