Learning something new is always harder, where to start! But most probably, if you are reading this, you’ve already started doing something extraordinary. Today, I will cover how to ask on the internet when you are just beginning as a programmer. Many newbies don’t know properly how to ask, and they get no reply from people. I help people using my Instagram, so I know how many weird things newbies usually ask. Still, it’s my personal opinion, so feel free to add more stuff down!
Googling
Googling is a must-needed skill for a newbie. You don’t know how to search and get ideas most of the time. I am not a super expert in this field, but I can do enough. But let me tell you the secret. First, try to search for the problem you have. Most of the time, you’ll find nothing (because you are just putting the whole error message in google, which google doesn’t understand correctly). So try to break it down. Get some part of error the put the language name after it. This way, you’ll get somewhere, not keep checking. Before asking anyone, you should do this. Without googling and spending at least 10mins on google, never ask anyone anything. It doesn’t matter what it is; keep searching for 10mins, and please check the second page of google too!
YouTube
There are so many content creators nowadays, so if you search your issue on YouTube, there is a massive chance that you’ll find it. If you don’t understand English well, just search for it in your language. So many local people are making content nowadays. Nobody can’t teach you everything, so don’t just hook into one single person; use multiple creators to get ideas in your head. Watch numerous explanations on each topic. Suppose you do not understand recursion properly – search recursion in your language, then recursion if it’s a concept. Try to find an animation for it.
Asking questions
Finally, if you don’t find what you are looking for on google/youtube. Time to ask people, so where can we find people to ask? Tough one, right? The good thing is that there are so many helping people in the world that you’ll find help without making tough choices. For programming questions, you should go to StackOverflow (which doesn’t guarantee that people will answer) so go to some instant messaging apps like
- discord
- slack
- telegram You’ll find so many groups of programming and ask there! Okay, but general groups don’t give you a guarantee that you’ll find some solutions. So usually go to a specific group for asking a particular question. Suppose you are looking for a “react” answer. First, join a few react communities; how to find it? One of the quick ways is going to respond and check the community. You’ll mostly find something in there! Reactiflux is an excellent choice.
Same thing you can do for vue and find some excellent links for vue! Most of the products nowadays have a community! If you find nothing, maybe check their repo in GitHub (which can help to ask something in there; or try to ask them on Twitter by tagging them in your post)
So now the main question is how to ask? Normally if it’s a general question, you can find it on google, so you don’t have to go for someone to ask. So you have a specific case to ask, right? If it’s a code-related issue, you need to share your code with the particular question. How to do it?
If it’s a small question, go to carbon and paste your code and share the screenshot. If it’s a more significant part of code, maybe this idea doesn’t work well, then make a public Github repo and share the repo (but it’ll be better if you can specifically tell people where to start looking). If possible, make a diagram to show how things are moving in your app. If it’s a CSS issue, then it’s tough for people to help with that without running, so maybe try to host it somewhere so that people can click and go to the link. With the link, anyone can inspect that help with CSS issues from their browser.
Be smart with what you are asking; if you can’t ask correctly, people will ignore you because they don’t have time to work with your ugly screenshot! They have their own life! So be specific on the point with the helpful stuff; maybe you’ll solve your property before asking anyone in this process. When coding for a reasonable amount of time, we forget the logic we build, or sometimes we focus less on the whole picture! So once we try to explain it to someone else, our brain finds the solution in explaining time. It has happened to me many times; I’m not sure if the brain works in this way. Either way, it’s worth trying!
How to keep up to date with the tech industry?
This is one of the great questions of any newbie. So try to follow people on Twitter. Instagram has many people who share programming content; you can follow there too! Facebook has some, but I use Instagram & Twitter for programming content. Reddit can be a good choice too!
I hope this blog will help at least a little in your journey! Remember, it’s a marathon; you can’t win in one hour, one day, or one month. You need to keep learning and building skills!
This post is originally published on NERDJFPB BLOG
I’ve community where we help each other to learn programming; if you are interest. Feel free to join – https://discord.com/invite/CaUPRUnckR
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