Getting Help with Programming#
Screenshots#
Sending me a screenshot is almost guaranteed to not get you help. Not because I do not want to, but because I literally do not have the information to get you an answer.
Typically when someone does not know how to fix something from the error message, it is because they are reading the wrong part of the error message or looking at the wrong part of the code trying to find the problem.
This means they end up screenshotting that wrong thing, so I literally cannot tell what is wrong from the screenshot.
I am not being stubborn, but I do need the right information to be able to tell what is wrong. Debugging code requires context, if you deprive me that, then I cannot help.
To get asynchronous help:
upload your whole notebook, errors and all
create an issue on that repo
Asking Questions#
One of my favorite resources that describes how to ask good questions is this blog post by Julia Evans, a developer who writes comics about the things she learns in the course of her work and publisher of wizard zines.
Describing what you have so far#
Stackoverflow is a common place for programmers to post and answer questions.
As such, they have written a good
guide on creating a minimal, reproducible example.
Creating a minimal reproducible example may even help you debug your own code, but if it does not, it will definitely make it easier for another person to understand what you have, what your goal is, and what’s working.
Understanding Errors#
Error messages from the compiler are not always straight forward.
The TraceBack can be a really long list of errors that seem like they are not even from your code. It will trace back to all of the places that the error occurred. It is often about how you called the functions from a library, but the compiler cannot tell that.
To understand what the traceback is, how to read one, and common examples, see this post on Real Python.
One thing to try, is friendly traceback a python package that is designed to make that error message text more clear and help you figure out what to do next.
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