The Art of Asking - FOSSY 2024 - PDX - Paige Cruz

When joining a new organization or project we’re often told “There are no bad questions - ask away!” and I fully endorse stoking your curiosity and connecting with others for help. I do believe that there are no bad questions but that there can be badly phrased questions. If you’ve ever had your questions go unanswered in online forums or are tired of hearing “it depends” time and time again this session is for you!

Between instant messaging platforms, mailing lists, social media accounts, wikis, repos, and meetups there are a lot of ways to connect and engage with an open source community/project and who you ask, when you ask, where and how can all affect the answers you get.

We will unpack what it takes to craft questions that get answered by reviewing several case studies of questions posed about OpenTelemetry across various channels. Finishing with a simple guide you can put into practice to master the art of asking to get answers.

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THE ART OF ASKING
Paige Cruz

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— YOUR ONBOARDING BUDDY (probably)
“There are no bad questions”

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“There are low effort questions”
— me

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ELEMENTS OF BETTER QUESTIONS

●DUE DILIGENCE
●BACKGROUND CONTEXT
●CONSIDER THE CHANNEL
●RELEVANT DETAILS
●GIVE BACK

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DUE DILIGENCE
1

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Does the latest version of the
auto-instrumentation agent
include metrics?

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Spend 10-15m
researching the answer
yourself
DUE DILIGENCE

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CHOOSE YOUR SOURCES WISELY

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SEARCH FIRST
●*official* project documentation
●*official* project repo - issues/bugs/PRs
●*official* project forum/wiki/mailing list
●search engine of your choice (!ChatGPT)
●instant messaging channel backscroll

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“We have a website, 100+ pages of documentation,
recordings of conference talks, and technical
documentation, all sent to the user as they join the
community.” - How I Ask Questions

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“It would have been different if they had asked me
something like:
‘I have been going through Meshery’s docs and been
trying it out locally. I’m unclear how Meshery adds value if
a person already uses a service mesh. Could you point me
to any docs where this is explained better?’”
- How I Ask Questions

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CONTEXT
2

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What is the best telemetry
pipeline for logs?

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PERSONAL CONTEXT

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ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXT

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PERSONAL & ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXT
●What’s your level of experience in the domain?
●What don’t you understand?
●What scale is your system operating at?
●What are your organizational constraints?

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CONSIDER
THE
CHANNEL
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Can someone help me figure
out why my data isn’t getting
to $VENDOR?

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SLACK IS NOT A KNOWLEDGE BASE

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CONSIDER THE CHANNEL
●Does this benefit from asking in IM?
●Is the question on-topic for the channel?
●Could this be an Issue or Bug Report?

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RELEVANT
DETAILS
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I’m trying to send metrics to
Prometheus & I set the scrape
endpoint correctly but no metrics
are sent...
Any help appreciated.

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RELEVANT

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RELEVANT

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RELEVANT

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RELEVANT DETAILS (TROUBLESHOOTING)
●The problem you are trying to solve
●What did you expect to happen? What happened
instead?
●Steps to reproduce
●OS, version, environment, etc.
●Code/config snippets that are minimal, complete,
and reproducible

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MINIMAL, COMPLETE, REPRODUCIBLE
●Minimal - restart from scratch and add in only what
is needed to see the problem with simple
variable/method names

●Complete - No screenshots of code, copy the actual
text!

●Reproducible - Can someone taking only what
you’ve provided in the question and run and verify
the issue?

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RELEVANT DETAILS (KNOWLEGE)
●What are you are seeking?
○Links to docs or learning resources
○Example code/config snippets
○Code change
●What do you already understand?
●What do you not understand?

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GIVE BACK
5

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xkcdxkcd
xkcd

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OPEN SOURCE IS POWERED BY VOLUNTEERS

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GIVING BACK
●Follow up with results of
research/troubleshooting in the thread
●Capture the learning in knowledge base for others
or add to the docs
●Answer similar questions in the future

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This means when you get an answer, and you are not
completely satisfied,
●say what you don’t understand.
●ask more clarifying questions.
●stop the speaker and ask more specific questions.

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PUTTING IT
ALL
TOGETHER
6

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●DUE DILIGENCE
●BACKGROUND CONTEXT
●CONSIDER THE CHANNEL
●RELEVANT DETAILS
●GIVE BACK

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This means when you get an answer, and you are not
completely satisfied,
●say what you don’t understand.
●ask more clarifying questions.
●stop the speaker and ask more specific questions.

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RESOURCES

●How I Ask Questions as a Software Engineer - Navendu
Pottekkat
●How to ask good questions - Julia Evans
●Minimal, Complete, Reproducible - Stack Overflow
●Purdue ChatGPT study
●r/AdvancedKnitting posting guidelines

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CREDITS

●Presentation template from slidesgo.com
●Icons from Flaticon
●Images from freepik.com

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THANKS!