Learning thorugh answering

By Eran Zimbler

10 more seconds of this useless slide

DevOps lead at Rumble News

Hi, My name is Eran Zimbler and I work at Rumble News as "DevOps lead"Also available as @zimbler on twitter and srgrn on github.

Recently there was a lot of commotion over the concept of the stack overflow developer.This curios idea is of a developer that learns just enough to do his job and usually by asking questions on stack overflow and copying the answers without thinking.

stack overflow answers are great way to find a quick soultions.I myself was able to write a whole python script to calculate all the distances from my home to specific points on a google maps layer and order them according to distance without writing a single line of code myself.

And I would guess everyone here knows stack overflow and proably other sites on the stack exchange network. Some people even have stack overflow accounts, maybe they wanted to ask a question or rate a question they needed the asnwer for a bit higher. and the smallest group of all would proably be the group that actually answer questsions on stack overflow.

in today's world each day there are lots of interesting new things to know.New programming languages or frameworks or constructs. New tools like monitoring systems or Saas products. New ways of thinking or methods of work or countless others.

Some things we learn for fun,Others we learn for our jobs, or personal gain.There are many ways to learn

You can learn from books.you can learn from online/offline courses.you can learn from tutorials or documantation.and you can learn indirectly from others.

There is another way however. Learning by teaching which wikipedia says is abbervaited to a germand Term LDL.The method is based on a premise that the students deliver the lessons after short prepartion by the teacher.

Insert Photo here from a previous lecture?

It is different than simply getting students to give lectures.The LDL method is based upon specific models on learning and brains structure and isn't as simple as it seems.it was initially used for teaching languages but it is today used for many subjects.

Back to our original subject:

Going back to the subject at hand. I learned a lot by answering questions.And while you gain technical knowldge it is not the only reason to answer. I learned several things by answering for example:

You learn how to better communicate. You get better each time as you want your answer to be clear enough and helpful enough to be selected as the right answer.

From some questsions you learn how to recreate an environment, duplicate a problem, and debug issues with stuff other people created. usually without access to the code or the enviroment in the problem.You also learn why it is important read the documantation as many questsions are simply becouse someone didn't bother to read documantation.

And while this is not something learned but something earned:if your answer gets upvotes or is chosen as correct you get points.Lots and lots of points. And since gamification does work on some people, it is a reward by iteself.

Well, I have a good example:I encountered a question about Conda and build. For those who doesn't use python, conda is the package manager for Anaconda a python distribution.

The questsion was about building a module from source its title was "Installing github version of package with Anaconda".I didn't have Anaconda installed at the time or ever used it for that matter.

It was a model of a very good question, with logs and explanations and even a link to another question where he said the solution didn't work for him. really a good example of how to ask questsions in a way conductive to get an answer.

And this was to me another important lesson, sometimes stuff that seems to work for you aren't actually solving the problem.The second soultion was better documented with better examples and it worked which is the ultimate goal of an answer.

At first I thought it a simple problem, read the answer he pointed to, looked over the code and documantation of conda, and wrote my answer.....and he tried it and it failed....So I read his comments and read some more. and really learned about how conda works and than even uploaded all the files I used as github gist. and it was the correct answer.

Now some people will say this is useless knowledge.however since than I am trying my best answering other questions. It helps me understand better stuff that I do know.and get better at my job of understanding other people problems.

The End

This was fun, as alwaysI hope you all will go online and try to answer questions on Stackoverflow.