I’m inexperienced with Stack Exchange. After days of effort I think I have a way of doing something with technology that is new to me. I have two objectives:

  1. Learn if the solution I’ve come up with follows recommended best practices.
  2. Post whatever I learn for other beginners like me.

I think I understand that Stack Overflow discourages the kind of opinion-oriented questions that begin with “Is this a good way to…”, so I’m tentatively planning to join Code Review (assuming that’s possible) and ask the question there.

When I settle on a technique, I’d like to share it with other beginners. Even if the code didn’t change as a result of the review, I’d want to post much more commented code to help beginners better understand context. I think the way to do that would be to ask a question at Stack Overflow and then answer it myself.

One concern I have is that the question titles at the two sites would look very similar to Google; though one would post code for experts and one for beginners.

Shall I proceed with that plan?

  • 4
    That's right, SO isn't the right place for something like that, and CR is, if the code you post in the question currently works. Self-answering on CR is quite odd though, you'll very likely get better answers from the experts there. If I were you, I'd post your full revised code on CR (including the technique you like, and including your comments and reasoning on what/why you're taking a certain approach if you want) and let others further critique or improve it, without a self-answer. Oct 9 '20 at 23:38
  • Thank you @CertainPerformance. I edited my question to clarify that my second question would be posted at Overflow rather than CodeReview. I'm new at this. Is there a way for me to "accept" your answer or whatever, so I add in a small way to your reputation? Oct 9 '20 at 23:49
  • Users can never earn or lose reputation for actions performed on meta, so no.
    – pppery
    Oct 10 '20 at 0:00
  • 1
    Please keep in mind that merely self-answering a question does not automatically share your experience with other beginners. By itself, it merely puts yet another piece of information on Stack Overflow. Consider early on whether the question and answer would be practically useful to other beginners, i.e. is it something people search for in the first place, is it something people would actually find when searching, is the information transferable from your case to others, and so on. Posting self-answers generally attracts serious, often harsh scrutiny by the community. Oct 10 '20 at 11:11
  • 1
    Thank you MisterMiyagi. I know that I would have loved to find the technique rather than having to piece it together, but the fact that I searched so hard without finding it may mean the software tool combination is too rare. In this case it might be a common requirement with common software tools, but without one of various commonly used libraries. Can you suggest another way to share that with others who might look without answering my own question? Does it belong somewhere other than Stack? (The topic is ajax with plain vanilla node.js -- post json without a form.) Oct 10 '20 at 12:49

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