Before the era of AI, a programmer’s best friend was Stack Overflow and the friends they made along the way.
While more people may be relying on AI chatbots as their coding assistant, Stack Overflow still has many answers to questions previously asked. It may not be as quick, but it’s typically expert advice. With AI, you can shamelessly ask the most foolish questions and often get a decent response. However, when you’re on Stack Overflow, it’s best to ask questions in a smarter way.
If you ask a smart question, you’re likely to get a smart answer. That’s the goal of Stack Overflow anyway. Here’s a pretty good example with a high rating: How to add images to README.md on GitHub?
This question is specific and to the point. The user searched online before asking the people on Stack Overflow. Smart! Unfortunately, the internet alone didn’t give very good advice. It’s one of those cases where even AI may not help you much. It’ll likely give the exact same advice as 13 years ago unless it learned from the answer to this Stack Overflow post. The question itself is open ended and received a few possible solutions. If one doesn’t work out, there are plenty of others to try.
I intentionally looked up some of the worst rated Stack Overflow questions. Here’s what I found: How to send 100,000 emails weekly?
This question was deemed bad enough to be locked and archived for historic purposes. Yikes! The main issue with it is that it is off topic. Stack Overflow is mostly used for coding problems. This was more of a vague question on how to send thousands of emails to people. The intent also seemed a bit suspicious.
If you want to ask a question, ask google or your default browser first! A nice website, like Stack Overflow, may pop up. You can see what someone else just like you asked, and you’ll get a definitive answer that isn’t an AI trying to gaslight you into thinking your intented result is incorrect. If it still doesn’t work, you can still ask a smart question to be answered by someone who knows what they’re doing.