Five Social Skills a DigiPen Student Needs to Learn: Part Two - A

Ask For Help!

But random internet blog!  How is that a skill?  That is just general advice!

Wrong.  

If there is a way to fail miserably at something, doing it right is a skill.

A lot of what we do is difficult and we are awesome for doing it.  A lot of what we do is not as difficult as we make it out to be.  

If you want to succeed you need to learn the difference between a difficult task and not having the right information.

As an example let us use a silly little situation that happened to me the other day that has never happened to me.  You have just done some amazing programming.  You are truly a prodigy.  You hit the build button and:

Errors?!  Windows must be broken!

Error:  expected initializer before ‘WindowProc’?  What does that even mean?  (For those of you in the know, pretend you’re not.  For those of you not in the know, read on brave adventurers!)

And ‘WindowProc’ was not declared?  That can’t be right!

Turns out you actually did declare ‘WindowProc’ back on line 8:

Of course I did.

This is absolute foolishness! You have to email every contact on your contact list and tell them you broke the world.

Or... you could google the error:

355,000 people are now helping you.

Of course, not everyone is going to be experiencing the exact same issue you are, but if you read what is going on with them it may give you some insight into what is going on with you.

The solution the internet found...

Your code...

Turns out semicolons are important.

In short, the first lesson about how to ask for help properly is to determine whether or not you need help. Not every wall you run into will be a brick one.

But random internet blog!  That was a really simple problem.  What if it is more complicated than that and google can’t help me?

While the google search engine is super powerful this does happen from time to time. Luckily you are surrounded by people who are either in the process of doing what you are doing, or have already successfully done what you are doing.  Now you just have to approach them for help!

Next time on this awesome blog that bajillions of people read:  

Five Social Skills a DigiPen Student Needs to Learn: Part Two - B

Min-maxing the asking for help game