Developers and engineers of all levels need help sometimes. Here is our suggested algorithm for finding help.

Things To Avoid

  1. Don’t immediately directly message another developer for help. It distracts them AND the answer to your question will live in your chat thread unavailable to the rest of the team in the future
  2. Don’t ask for help without attempting to find the answer yourself. But if you’ve been stuck on something for more than an hour or two you should definitely reach out. It’s helpful when asking your question to make sure that you clearly describe what you’re trying to do, and what you’ve tried so far.

How to Get Help

  1. Search Dashworks (web.dashworks.ai) for the error message or subject that you’re trying to learn more about. The page is particularly helpful if you’re lost about terminology.
    1. There are also several Outage Run books that may be helpful reference for common problems.
  2. Search Notion and JIRA for information about the project you’re working on to find more context or the product spec. This can help you to better understand how the code you’re working on fits into the broader company’s ecosystem.
  3. Search google or stack overflow for the error message you’re seeing, or for more information about the library / framework / language / tool you’re working with.
  4. If you’re still stuck Post to #egt in slack with a detailed description of
    1. What you’re trying to do with as much background context as possible.
    2. What you’ve done so far (where you’ve looked for information, changes you’ve tried to make and what happened when you attempted to make those changes: errors, behavior of the code, etc.).
    3. Links to the code/system you’re working with and any context that would make it fast for you to find the answer to this question (github links, links to log entries, links to github PRs, etc.).
  5. If you’re working on a specific part of our codebase you can click the “blame” button on github (or run git blame in your terminal) to see a history of who has worked on the files you’re looking at. You can @ them in the #egt slack thread you’ve already posted asking your question.
  6. If you still can’t find an answer escalate to your manager
  7. Last Step Very Important in an effort to make the whole company more efficient you should DOCUMENT the answer to the question you found. Teaching others how to solve your problem with make you a better practitioner of your craft and will help the people that come after go more quickly

Open Source Help Communities

Several open source tools have slack channels where you can ask the community for help. When posting question be detailed similar to asking questions in our internal slack it’s important that you include information about what you’re trying to do, what you’ve tried (including code snippets, log statements and output from executed code) and what you’re trying to learn. The members of these communities aren’t paid to help you, so be respectful and gracious. In addition to these help resources you may find articles linked in the Engineering Library helpful.

React

The “Reactiflux” community is a Discord server for React, React Native, Redux, Jest, Relay and GraphQL users and developers. You can read more about the community at https://www.reactiflux.com/ and follow their link to “Join Reactiflux”