MaximeI love Stackoverflow. Probably like a lot of other developers out here. It has helped me thousands of times and saved me countless hours of debugging.
This has lead me to start contributing onto it as well, with the idea that I could give back to the community. I can't say I contribute regularly, but every once in a while I go through topics I like and see if there are some questions I can help on.
While reading a lot of questions, I've noticed that a lot of people don't realise how much quicker they could get an answer by following simple rules. It'd give them a tremendously better views/replies ratio and hopefully let them get the answer they're looking for.
In this blog post, I'm going to share a few tips that may sound obvious for some, but may really help others get answers in general. It's based on my personal feeling and experience using Stackoverflow. I believe most of the following could also apply for example when creating an issue on Github.
The most important tip I'll start with, is also a global summary: Help yourself by making it easy for people to help you. You have to put yourself in the readers' shoes.
Realise that people are reading questions and trying to help you out for free. So if the question is poorly written, chances are, they'll just move on without trying to put much effort into answering. Assume that people will put as much energy answering, than you did when writing the question
When sharing code, never copy paste entire blocks of code directly. Isolate the code with the issue to the best of your knowledge. Then remove everything that isn't essential to your issue. For example if you're sharing some HTML, keep the overall structure, but remove tags, classes, comments that you know are not part of the issue. Even better, create a minimal reproduction highlighting the issue with only what's needed to repro. It takes time. It is not simple. But if you move that burden to the readers, it's unlikely they'll stick around
When possible, create a live reproduction. There are plenty of tools available out here for pretty much all the languages! When it comes to anything relating to Javascript/Typescript, my go to solution is Stackblitz. Blazingly fast, can save projects, fork them, they're easy to share and there's no need to register an account to read or write code by default. Definitely recommend it. But if you're not using Javascript/Typescript, do check for equivalent in your language. Another example I've got in mind is Kotlin. You can use https://play.kotlinlang.org which lets you write, test and share your code easily as well. Find a way for people to play easily with the code you're sharing. It'll help them try solutions on their side and iterate quickly
In conclusion, always ask yourself this question: "If someone who doesn't know anything about my business case was to read this question, would he understand and being able to debug it himself?".
