Hello there you beautiful people. 2
And in this lecture I'm very excited to share with you a secret. 3
They're all top programmers now. 4
And it's one that is going to save you countless hours of headache. 5
Now this isn't some super cool new tool or a magic button you press that invents the next Facebook. 6
But it's a really practical piece of advice that you can use all the time. 7
So what is this secret. 8
Well one of the best kept secrets is knowing how to ask great questions. 9
Now I know that's really cheesy but everyone gets questions when programming no matter how awesome or 10
experienced they are asking questions is really just a fact of life for a programmer and learning how 11
to ask great questions. 12
One play to fix your problems much faster and save you loads of time and headache in the process. 13
If you put in a little extra energy up front it will continue to save you time for years and years to 14
come. 15
When you get stuck and you always will. 16
Trust me a massive benefit you have from signing up to this course is a part of a vibrant and collaborative 17
community of students just like you that are facing very similar challenges and very similar successes 18
. 19
So in this community we're all working together as a team to help each other succeed and have fun learning 20
Python and be around in the forms of macewan sections as much as I possibly can to help out. 21
And you may as well make use this community in order to create a more fun and fast paced learning via 22
for everyone and save yourself time when you get stuck. 23
So in this lecture we're going to go over the process for asking a great question in the course discussion 24
forums and by the end of this lecture you have a really rigorous and rich process for asking programming 25
related questions that will serve you excellently in your future as a Python programmer on this course 26
and beyond. 27
I've put a link to a downloadable version of this process in the notes for this lecture. 28
So go ahead and open that and make sure that you have it open. 29
As you follow through with this lecture also make sure you use it in the future when you ask a question 30
in this course because it'll make everything go much more smoothly. 31
Trust me. 32
So how do you ask questions in the forum. 33
We head on over to the course dashboard. 34
You'll see a tall bar at the top. 35
The looks something like this. 36
And even here you'll see a certain tab that says Q and A which stands for questions and answers. 37
So click on map and it will open up the forums in here you'll be able to search for people's questions 38
using this text box but you'll also be able to ask new questions of your own. 39
So let's ask a question. 40
By clicking the Ask a new question button over here in the beautiful green. 41
If you have the checklist downloaded for this lecture from the lecture downloads which I highly encourage 42
you to do. 43
You'll see that step number one for creating a great question is to have a great question title any 44
new question. 45
The first thing you need to add in the question title is The Help tag to help tag looks like this. 46
You open up some square brackets type in the word help and close the square brackets. 47
What this does is it let everyone know that the question still hasn't been answered and that you'd still 48
like some help when your question has been solved. 49
Make sure to change the help tag to a solved tag that looks like this. 50
You basically replace the word help with the word solved so that we all know that it's been solved and 51
can look at it. 52
If we have a similar problem next time. 53
This will also stop you getting notifications that you don't need anymore when making you course title 54
. 55
Use a clear and descriptive title that makes it very clear what the issue is. 56
The clearer the better. 57
This is the most critical thing because if it's really easy to see what the problem is it will be much 58
faster for people to figure out what's wrong. 59
Whether they can help and actually help you solve the problem faster. 60
Let's say our question was that values weren't being imprinted to the screen when we were running our 61
script we might type a question that looks something like this would start with our help tag and then 62
type answer not being shown on screen when running Python script. 63
Now down here in this box we need to add a description for our problem so we can give it a bit more 64
context. 65
You must include these five steps in the description to have an excellent question. 66
The first one is the observed behavior. 67
What did you actually see happen. 68
The second one is the expected behavior. 69
What should have happened and what did you expect. 70
The third one is a link to the code you used which will be using an external service for this purpose 71
. 72
The fourth one is where you think the problem might be like in a what line you think might be broken 73
. 74
And the fifth one is a list of all the things you've tried already. 75
On top of all this include other relevant information such as errors in warning text version info and 76
screenshots where required. 77
So let's go through the process of creating a description by using our checklist according to our checklist 78
. 79
The first thing we need to do is add an observed behavior so the observed behavior might be something 80
like script run successfully. 81
But the answer doesn't show up r.k. Call the next thing we will need to do is to add our expected behavior 82
i.e. what we wanted to happen. 83
So what we might write would be. 84
I expected the answer to to show up on the screen when I ran the script. 85
Okay now we need to add the link to our code for this. 86
We're going to use an external and totally amazing service called gist. 87
So what we need to do is head over to gist. 88
Get Herb dot com. 89
I'll put a link that you can click on in the US in the lecture. 90
Now you don't need an account for this. 91
Let's add a title for a file called problem dog. 92
P Y. 93
And copy and paste the code into it will notice that Gist does very nice highlighting for us. 94
And this depends on the language we use Python would have different highlighting to Java for example 95
no click create secret gist. 96
Well you've done that. 97
Just copy and paste the link at the top here. 98
This is the link to your jest. 99
Anyone with that link can see the code and help you out. 100
So will copy and paste that into our question. 101
No we need to say where we think the problem might be. 102
There must be something different between the script and using the shell. 103
It worked in the shell. 104
YS wanted to hold the issue I think is something missing that maybe some of them would write. 105
Next step is a list of things we've tried already. 106
While we didn't try too much. 107
So I've tried running the script with different numbers. 108
It didn't make any difference. 109
Finally we need to add any extra information that we have error messages. 110
Well there's no error message. 111
Version number in three point five point two screenshots not required. 112
Now that we followed through our checklist we can post this question with confidence and know that it 113
is an excellent ask question. 114
It's really easy to understand and is therefore going to be solved as quickly as possible. 115
This is well worth the effort. 116
Believe me there's an added benefit. 117
It's very likely that you'll probably have solved the problem whilst asking the question which saves 118
everyone loads of time. 119
By the way if someone does help you out. 120
Feel free to keep in touch with them and try to build a friendship to help each other out in the future 121
. 122
That kind of study body situation is great for making new friends and it really helps you learn much 123
better when you can share ideas with other people. 124
If you do make friends with someone on the course. 125
Could you please send a message to me about it you've made me really happy to see that he would really 126
really make my day anyway. 127
Let's say I'm browsing the forum and I see your question. 128
I recognize that you need help by seeing the help tag like the legend that I am. 129
I come over to help. 130
The question is clear and I immediately understand the problem. 131
I read more and see that you're using a script. 132
Check out the code and then it hits me. 133
You forgot to use the print function. 134
I type a message saying put the additions inside the print function. 135
That should solve your problem. 136
You try it out and indeed it works. 137
You can mark the question is solved. 138
So if anyone else has this problem they can find it and solve it too nerd of politeness. 139
I send a thank you message to the helper and ask if they want to keep in touch. 140
There we are. 141
That's how to ask and answer questions in this course. 142
There we have it. 143
We've asked a very well thought out question and got an answer to our problem as fast as possible. 144
Possibly maybe even made a new friend a knowing had as great questions. 145
Is a secret of all the top programmers and how you have it to know that we've installed Python but introduced 146
to Idol and know how to ask great questions if we get stuck. 147
Were 100 percent ready to dive into the world of Python programming. 148
This is where adventure truly begins. 149
So buckle up and I'll see you in the next video.