A key part of programming is troubleshooting. Whether it be a minor bug or strange behavior, you’re likely to have questions if you spend time programming. Some problems will be solved by rereading your code aloud to a rubber duck (or convenient friend), but others will prove too vexing to just puzzle through. Thankfully, we have the internet, and the ability to search problems online. In many cases, problems aren’t totally unique; someone else has had the exact same problem or one very similar to it. In those cases, it’ll pop up at the top of the suggestions in the search engine of your choice, usually on Stack Overflow. There will be some cases however, where the problem you are looking for has yet to be identified by someone else. In those cases, you will be the one posting to Stack Overflow, and others answering your inquiry.
Probably the best thing to learn is how to ask questions in a way that will provide good answers. Questions that are descriptive and clear generally receive good informative feedback. Additionally, questions that ask “why” are likely to be answered well, while questions asking “how” may have varying levels of quality to their answer. A good why question can be seen at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-processing-a-sorted-array-faster-than-processing-an-unsorted-array/, where the user asks about a strange behavior they observed in their code. They find that a certain code block runs significantly faster on sorted data rather than unsorted data, which is consistent across multiple programming languages. They provide the code snippets they ran and stated the times they achieved. The user also asks clear questions of what is happening to get this outcome and why is it happening. They received a response that has an incredibly detailed and explanative answer to their questions describing branch prediction in a concise, easy-to-understand way.
While it can be easy to write questions that aren’t that descriptive and that give a general overview of the problem, those are unlikely to receive any meaningful help. Another why question, but one that is poorly written can be found at: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41137599/a-broken-image-destroys-login-session-why. The user in this case doesn’t have the best grammar, nor are they clear or informative about their problem. All that they provide is the information that a user logs into their site, and upon viewing a broken image, is logged out of the site. Without any code or extra information to go off of, people are left guessing and asking the user for additional information. No resolution to their problem is found.
I find that a great first step to asking questions is entering them in a search engine. Through repeatedly failing to get helpful results, you will learn which keywords are important and how to best phrase questions in order to get helpful answers. Additionally, observing the problems of others may give insight into how to solve your own problems, or answer a question you may have had with your own code. Asking questions is fundamental to learning, and the better your questions, the better your learning. In general, people are looking to help you understand more about coding, and those on Stack Overflow are genuinely trying to help you solve your problem.