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Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

Comments on How does the community feel about resource requests?

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How does the community feel about resource requests?

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How does the community feel about resource requests?

For example: I have been working on a project recently. By which I mean: mostly stumbling through by trial-and-error. The particular open source product I have been using appears to be poorly-documented beyond setting up a Maven extension project. Documentation for how to write code to do various tasks is very sparse.

I think a productive question to ask would be specific and include details, such as "what are the extension points to perform this task I need to accomplish?" along with details about the task. Or, "which classes and constants contained in the project are relevant to the task?" However, ideally, there would be some tutorial or guide that (so far) is just outside the reach of Google that has eluded me thus far.

Anyway, I understand questions like this are very unwelcome over there and I wish not to make a negative contribution if this community feels the same way.

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I think these kinds of questions are fine, but I am just one person.

open source product I have been using appears to be poorly-documented is an extremely common problem. I have actually seen the problem even on some paid products. So searching for help that should be in a project's documentation is not unusual at all.

A lot depends on the way questions are asked. But asked in a reasonable way, and showing attempts at prior research, such questions can be quite appropriate.

A different thing, which may or may not happen here, is the possibility of people creating documentation of projects or technologies, how-to guides or other types of articles that would be of help to lots of people. There are many other places on the internet for such things, but linking them together with relevant Q&A is something being considered as part of Codidact, along with other things a little different from "just another Q&A system".

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meriton‭ wrote over 4 years ago · edited over 4 years ago

We should be really explicit that people are expected to search thoroughly before asking reference questions lest we become the googling service for those too lazy to google. Just now, we had somebody inquire about how DNS works who hadn't even read the relevant Wikipedia page!