getting better help by getting better at asking for help

I was working on a problem recently where I needed to extend the type of a standard HTML element.

It was an interesting problem and I hope to write about it soon (if only so I don’t forget how to solve it in the future). Along the way, however, I asked a few people to take a look at what I was working on and I didn’t get much response. A little later, a few folks replied that I could get more responses more quickly if I took a little extra effort.¹

It was a good reminder of a lesson I’d learned in the past and clearly needed to remember: when asking for help, make it as easy as possible for the other person to help.

Thanks for the reminder!

Footnotes

• ^[1] The specifics here was that I was asking for help in a public Slack and I used a text block instead of a code snippet. This meant that my snippet didn’t have any syntax highlighting that Slack can include and had line-wrapping. Both of which make reading the code more challenging.