I am a software engineer based in the Twin Cities, MN who is passionate about all things tech. During my day job I work as full-stack dev at Soona. I enjoy talking about tech at local and national events/conferences, creating cool stuff on the side, and writing tech articles to share useful information and tips. During my free time I enjoy spending time with my baby boy, traveling the world, and creating fun DIYs.

Beginning:

• A personal story from my first tech job that change my outlook on ""there is no such thing as a dumb question.""
• Sharing the story on how the types of questions I asked negatively affected my superior's perception of my tech skills.
• State what my talk will consist of: addressing 5 steps with examples of asking effective questions on the internet(stack overflow, medium, google in general) and to team members.

Middle:

• Walk through an example of a technical problem that might get you stuck (with code samples) and how to go through the 5 steps to asking the right questions to get to a solution.
• For example 1. Start by doing your own troubleshooting (through the internet, StackOverflow, Medium, Youtube, etc, reading error messages).
• 2. Make sure question is specific for example instead of asking ""why am i getting a migration error during rollback-rails"" to ""how to correctly rollback migration column in rails"".
• Go through each of the 5 steps and finally get to the working solution.

End:

• Summarizing 5 steps and take aways
• Ending with story from personal experience how using these steps have helped me work smarter and decreased levels of imposter syndrome by not feeling my questions were dumb questions

Here is a download link to the talk slides (PDF)

This talk will be presented as part of CodeLand:Distributed on July 23. After the talk is streamed as part of the conference, it will be added to this post as a recorded video.

Glossary:

• Ruby on Rails: a backend language for web applications
• VueJs: an open-source javascript framework
• rspec: a test tool written in ruby on rails
• capybara: (not the animail 😜) a library that allows us to easily simulate how a user interacts with our app
• devise: a rails gem used for authentication
• system test: allows us to test user interaction for various test cases
• factory_bot: using as a fixtures replacement, which means it helps us produce test data