The Simple Yet Tough to Nail Art of Asking Coding Doubts

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Dear Student, if you are unwilling to put the extra effort to ask questions the right way, I don’t see why, I should put the effort to solve your problem.

For new learning students, perhaps the biggest and demotivating challenge is to ask doubts and questions, the right way.

Every week, I get contacted by students from all over the world, asking me for one or the other doubt and stuff like that. This is good. I have always believed in helping students when I can.

Why I Spend 2 Hours Every day Answering Student Doubts on Email, Discord and GitHub

However, there is such a concept that is simply called, “Help me, Help You”

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Plenty of time, this concept itself seems to baffle my students. Although, it only seems natural to me, as a tutor.

The idea here is, you must present your doubt in a way that can be replicated visually and code wise, on my computer.

Here is a common scenario. A student is having issues, where a for loop is not working. Here is what a lot of students do.

1. simply tell me, that their for loop is not working.
2. taking photos from their mobile phone and sharing the photo with me.

Neither of these two actions help me.

Things get even more complex when a student is having issue with an entire project. Once again, here is what happens, in addition to the above two actions.

1. copy pasting the error (or worse, send a photo of the error)
2. sending the specific file or only the specific line where they think the error might be happening.
3. sending me the entire project as a zip folder and asking me to run it.

Once again, all this is simply a waste of time, and won’t help me, help the student.

So, here are some simple things to remember when asking questions.

1. If you are asking a JavaScript doubt, please put your code on CodePen (or a similar online code editor)
2. If you are asking a doubt on React, please put your code on CodeSandbox.
3. If you are asking a doubt on a full stack project, then, you have to share the entire project on GitHub, update your README.MD with steps on how to run the project locally, and also include database and other ‘connection’ details to run the project.

So, there you have it. Please remember. I myself, and many other tutors all over the world, do love helping students.

However, as I said before, if you are unwilling to put the extra effort to ask questions the right way, I don’t see why, I should put the effort to solve your problem.

I work as a full-time freelance Coding Tutor. Career and Life Coach. Hire me at UpWork or Fiverr or GitHub. see my personal website. my art hobby at Behance and Unsplash and ArtStation and Dribbble.. Also, podcast about life. and my Coding YouTube Channel. and also, my Movie YouTube Channel.