How to get Answers to your Coding problems

Hi Digital Lovers,

It's been a long week attending London Tech week and I want to talk about sourcing answers to your coding problems online when you get stuck and you need to debug, its easier to type in the words on Google and implement answers you find on Stackoverflow, W3schools, GitHub, Codementor e.t.c.

Then we realize that the answers we find didn’t solve our problem and we go further to attempt more and more answers until we end up wasting three days solving one coding problem, it seems familiar right? At first, I thought it was only junior developers that go through this circle until I see senior developers searching tirelessly online for solutions.

How do we approach this differently? How can we be more efficient in seeking solutions to our problems? I found a few suggestions using trial and error and I would love to share them with you.

Take a break away from coding when you get stuck:- With deadlines given to us, we tend to work faster and harder especially when you feel your limited ability is sticking out its ugly head. Taking a break and coming back refreshes the brain. You might need 10 mins or 1hr break. Make sure you take plenty of water in between.

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Check the dates when the answers were posted, they might be outdated due to the creation of newer versions:- The answers we are implementing might be older than our current version, with various software being updated and upgraded all the time, this fact is solid and you should be sure that your answer matches the current version of your app to save you time in debugging.

The problem might lie in asking the wrong question:- Asking the right questions helps you in getting the right answers, if I don’t see my image displayed when I run the server, it might not be the fault of my HTML but the fault of the image API. Until I know exactly where the problem is and I can define it, then I can easily get the answer I am looking for.

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Join communities on LinkedIn and post your problems there:- Joining communities that align with your project is crucial in getting a personal solution to your problem from an individual who is experienced in the work you are developing.

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Create a Stackoverflow account and start your thread:- We are used to reading and implementing solutions on sites like #stackoverflow but we are poor at posting our questions and starting a thread. Starting a thread gives you more targeted answers to your question.

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A quiet room or good music could shift the mind:- This is important when your head feels blocked and you can’t do some deep logical thinking, a quiet room and a meditation-like mind opens the blocked path while a piece of good music is very efficient when you are doing great designs.

Read your code line after line, file/folder after file/folder:- if you understand how to read and interpret every single line of your code, especially responses from your server, you can easily point out the problem on time and get solutions fast. It is also good to Google about how things work and read about them, it keeps you educationally sound as well.

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