From the text, the author stated that the people with a Stack Overflow account like challenging questions. However, they must be specific and not just have generalities. People are there to help, but they do not want to just do the work for the person writing the question. Also, asking a smart question will not only benefit you in the sense that you have a higher chance of getting your issue solved, but it will also benefit the people answering it. This is because others might have run into the same issue, and helping someone fix a problem is a great way to learn to prevent that problem (as well as other problems deriving from the original problem) in the future (a learning experience). An example of this type of “smart question” includes this developer’s recent one. The developer uses the “smart techniques” from Raymond and Moen’s article, such as asking a specific problem, and giving the input he or she was expecting. The developer also gave the general area of where the error was, signifying that they had a good idea of where the error was. This smart question was rewarded with another fellow member of Stack Overflow answering their question, implying the person asking the question was very close, and following up with the solution to the issue.
As stated in the title, there is such a thing as a “not-smart question”. These types of questions are rhetorical questions, questions people ask when they are lazy, and many of them seem to be homework problems. Although there are some cases where the person really doesn’t understand the concept and they were struggling to find a solution, many don’t even bother to try and solve it on their own. An example includes this lazy developer’s homework problem. If you click on the link, the question is labeled as “closed”. This is because the question followed all the “non-smart” ways, including the fact that it was a homework problem (not learning the material), and the question was too general (“What’s wrong with my code?” is not a valid “smart question”). Besides the fact that the question was closed, the responses given were blunt (many might perceive it as “rude”). This question was also answered by another person in a similar question on Stack as well; this just goes further to show they really didn’t try to search for an answer properly.
From doing this assignment and analyzing questions to see which category they fall under (smart versus non-smart), I have gained better insight on how to ask smart questions. When doing a problem, or figuring out an issue, it is always a must to try it on your own first. After that comes the research, and asking the question seems more like a last-minute resort to attempt to alleviate the issue. I also now understand that you must elaborate on your issue in order to show that you have tried the problem first and you have a small understanding on where the problem lies. Learning how to ask smart questions are significant, especially for programmers and developers, because code is picky and syntactical. Every single punctuation, spacing, and letter gets analyzed, similar to the way you should be treating your smart questions. Therefore, learning to ask smart questions are vital for a developer to succeed in the modern day.