How to Stop Sucking at StackOverflow and Start Kicking Ass! James - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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