Message Board Guidelines

General principles

I want our message board (piazza) to be a friendly place where we can help each other out. To make sure this vision is realized as best as it can be, please help me in observing the following guidelines.

1. When asking questions, perform due diligence first. That is, make sure you’ve done a bit of work to try to figure things out on your own before taking other people’s time and attention. At a minimum, make sure you’ve
   • done the assigned reading
   • searched piazza for similar questions
   • lastly, if your problem is technical but not directly about programming (e.g. you get errors installing or running the virtual machine), please at least google¹ the error message and see if there isn’t an answer among the first few search results.
2. This specializes the above, but I think deserves special mention: read the project READMEs carefully! They were written carefully and deserve to be read with care.
3. When answering questions, be humble and tactful, and think before posting! In particular, think carefully about how what you say is going to sound to the recipients, and try to avoid making people feel dumb or inadequate. No matter how much you know, you surely have a lot left to learn, and most everything you now know, you didn’t know always.
4. In general, try to assume your peers have good intentions. Just because an answer is terse doesn’t mean it’s intended to be rude.
5. If you’ve asked a question, be sure to follow up, and please mark the question as “resolved” once you have a satisfactory answer.

NOTE: Your instructors are not exempt from any of these guidelines. If you think I’m being a jerk at some point, call me out on it!

When asking about git

If you are having issues with git, please be sure to include the following in your post:

• The output of git status.
• The exact command you were trying to run, and the exact message detailing what went wrong.²

Images vs text

TL;DR text makes searches work, so include text in posts.

More specifically:

• Please don’t post images that contain nothing but text. Post the text instead. See remarks below about formatting source code.
• If an image is helpful and it contains text (like an error message) please type out the text or error message and include that in your post. If you don’t, no one else with that problem will be able to find your post when using the search feature.

Formatting source code

When posting code, please use the “code” formatting, or if using the plain text editor, place your code in <pre> tags. This preserves indentation and makes it much easier to read for others! You can also use <md> to type markdown.