How to Stop Sucking at StackOverflow and Start Kicking Ass! James (JD) Long jdlong@gmail.com @cmastication
Kathy Sierra:
Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood Found StackOverflow in early 2008 Spolsky pointing at the 2009 growth figures
Time machine back to 2008
46:10 Joel: “Aw slick!” Jeff: “I totally support this!”
https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/07/stack-overflow-flash-mobs/
…
Flash Mobs
but where are we now?
Holy Shit!
Linear Trend
Percent Deviation From Trend (actual - modeled) / modeled
WTF? Hadley’s Jay Z’s Birthday Birthday Average % Deviation By Month
How to get answers to your [r] question! How to stop sucking!
start with the fundamentals search Google and Stack Overflow read the R Info tag on SO: http://stackoverflow.com/ tags/r/info there are two R tags on SO: [r] & [r-faq] (as of May 2011)
nothing on google or SO… let’s write a question
Empathy is your super power…
Copy and Paste-able Minimal Example Don’t share your whole function. Make example of the bit that sucks.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5963269/how-to-make-a-great-r-reproducible-example
Show what you’ve tried…
Be clear what you are trying to accomplish (and don’t terminal dump)
bring a code problem, not a business problem or a research problem
Speaking of off topic…
If all else fails, try kitten GIFs on Twitter…
Summary Things that kick ass: Things that suck: • Empathy • Terminal copy & paste • Minimal Examples • Requiring answerer to parse • Simple Copy & Paste-able your crap • Pure opinion answers Examples • Illustrations of what you tried • Asking business or research • Explanations of desired questions outcome • Kitten GIFs
Magic Surprises (you won’t believe #2!)
Magic Surprises (you won’t believe #2!) • You’ll solve your own problems when you build the minimal example
Magic Surprises (you won’t believe #2!) • You’ll solve your own problems when you build the minimal example • You’ll discover you asked the same question before
but I heard that Stack Overflow blows?
what’s painful? • antagonistic to new users • reign of privileged trolls • more bitching about moderators
the top [r] answerers are pretty reasonable… if you are giving negative feedback, don’t be a dick … empathy think about the volume of questions… rewrite!
Code: https://gist.github.com/CerebralMastication/f5408672ac627511399d7a643eb297ef
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