I asked my first question on StackOverflow today and within minutes, I got answers to my question. Unlike what I read online about difficulties in asking a question, mine was actually easy. Aside from insisting I used a title that describes the question and no one has used before which took few minutes, everything went well.
What was your experience when you asked your first ever question on StackOverflow?
Originally published on my blog. Feel free to check out my other articles.
Latest comments (28)
The first time I posted on SO I specifically asked for a way to do something in vanilla javascript, NOT jQuery.
I immediately received a bunch of downvotes, edits to my original question, and a bunch of replies with how to do it in jQuery. 😩
Never posted again... lol
My first question never got an answer. But the ones after it did. My questions were also never voted down. But I try to make answering them as easy as possible, by giving as much information as possible of which I can imagine being helpful to understanding the problem.
It is a bit like when you get feedback for something you coded, that does not work. You need as much info as you can get to locate the problem.
After that it is usually just some kind of intellectual challenge. And there you have those guys. They love those kind of challenges.
I don't remember now the very first one because I think it was removed because it was either "duplicate" or "off-topic", but the very first in my history on the site was not answered until now. It was September 2017. I refrain from asking question because of the bad reputation it has. Generally, I find answers to my problems in other questions, many of them are marked as duplicate and when I take a look at it, it is not actually duplicate, it is a completely different context and sometimes the solution don't apply.
I'm naturally averse to asking questions, it is possible to count in one hand how many times I asked questions during my school years and for that reason, when I do have a question, it is a real struggle and I don't like the feeling that SO users are always belittling people's questions. =/
It's great, but don't do any mistakes on your questions or you'll be burned by the community... My first question was a duplicate (but I didn't know), the response was not very kind.
"SO" is easy to use, and under-used. Some editors might seem like sticklers if you're a noob, but mostly it's a relaxed place by anonymous internet standards.
I found my first question on SO:
stackoverflow.com/questions/170303...
I really liked it (then) and stayed. At programmers.stackexchange I feel the most at home in the Stackexchange universe.
When I posted my first question on StackOverFlow I got 3 down votes. 😂
I had exactly the same experience. In fact it was 1 minute after I posted that a model answer appeared. Amazing. I had to wait 15 minutes before I could select it as my preferred answer, in which time there was another answer, several comments on the answers, and a comment on the question that helped me to clarify it. Great experience. It is not in my nature to not thank people, though.
Well, I think they recommend you don't actually say thank you XD
Indeed, that's my point. I'd rather be able to thank people, and I don't see why it isn't allowed. I do "thank them by voting up" though.
I'm looking back at the questions I asked, and they're all over six years ago. Mostly, I have advanced enough and SO's body of questions has advanced enough that I rarely find a question I have that isn't already answered.
I recall that asking questions can be fairly painless, unless it doesn't quite fit under the right domain. Asking a question about the right way to wrangle a project in Git, as an example, might be pushed to the Software Engineering SO as "off-topic", then pushed back, while 'How do I install git in Ubuntu' would stay in Ask Ubuntu.
(Speaking of Ask Ubuntu, I have a question about telling if the screen is locked or not that I asked twice, because one was pre-14.04 and Gnome, while the other was post-14.04 and Unity, with significantly different answers.)
My question was terrible. But as far as I remember, the answers I got didn't solve my problem because I didn't give enough data. After a month, I figured it out myself. It was my fault for not giving enough data about the problem.
The question. There was a problem with the margin/padding of the body element.
Experienced developers literally worship that site and stupidity strictly not allowed.
Learned through hard way though
The first time I asked a question. I was told to be more clear about the question.
Other time I asked, got the answer, but a guy told me to learn regular expressions.
My first question was three years ago. I was transitioning from Java to C++. And tried to rewrite my learning project, a toy game engine. It worked well until I was trying to load libraries at run time. Turns out the error message was just bad and my error had nothing to do with the loading, but with my project setup (stackoverflow.com/questions/297098...).
After that 5 of my 10 questions were Haskell ones. The people in that community tend to be very nice to newcomers.
Fantastic!!! You people carry a pretty clear/impressive track record on the first impression.
Answers/Comments to my first SO question(Here we go):
Question(somewhere around 2009):
How can I pass data from one page to another in JSP?
Reasons for asking this question:
It was the only second day I had heard of the word "JSP" and I was learning JSP.
No, I was not expecting em to do my homework. I was extremely passionate to learn JSP/Servlet and other technologies which my classmates were not even aware of.
PS: I created a fresh account thereafter and still continuing with the same.
I asked only two questions and noone could answer it. In the end I found my own answer then answered my own question. After that I stopped asking question on StackOverflow.