The primary goal of the community is to build a positive place for anybody to get the support they need, regardless of background.
- Golden Rule - Treat others as you want to be treated.
- Be Overly Polite - You don't know how others will perceive you, especially coming from different backgrounds as we do in this diverse community. Straightforward or "normal" answers might be perceived as cold. Please:
- Sandwich responses inside positive & friendly wording and proof read them.
- Tentative language goes a long way, instead of "This has a problem..." try "I think this may have a problem..."
- To give some frank feedback, preface it with "This is a great question!"
- Do as Alex and Rahul do - Their goal is to set the example for the rest of the community. They always strive to respond in a respectful and thoughtful manner.
- Thank People - If anyone takes time out of their day to help you, please be sure to thank them! This community is purely an engine of goodwill; everyone is a volunteer. If someone helps you out a lot, consider thanking them publicly in #shoutouts.
We want this community to be worth everyone's time. Messages should be relevant to the channel they're posted in.
Please take a moment to find the right channel before posting...
We ensure every channel has a topic, description, and bookmarked/pinned resources. You can understand the rules of any channel and see the great content that's already been shared and created within it. Please spend a few minutes going through these before posting in the channel. This keeps the channel clean & focused, for healthy discussion, and minimizes the community having to solve the same problem twice.
Please make sure questions are of high-quality before asking them, just like working at an actual job. The more time and thought we put into our question, the faster we'll get an effective answer and the better the overall community will be for everyone. Learning to ask effective questions is a deep skill which Rahul and Alex have spent years mastering and we want you to develop the ability to ask amazing questions too. You can learn how to do that by watching their video playlist here.
We want this community to be a "training ground" to grow the skills needed to succeed within a professional tech environment. A lot of you will (and maybe already do) work in tech companies that use Slack to collaborate and communicate. A tech job will have you collaborating with other tech people, and that's exactly what this community is about as well.
People notice when others are nice and go out of their way to help, especially in this community. If you want more high-quality answers and support for your question(s) then try providing some of that, yourself, for the questions of others. Alex deeply believes that humans inherently value fairness, and there's something that intrinsically motivates us to help those who help us and others.
We spend extra time & effort supporting those which we've seen supporting others out of the kindness of their heart. Of course, if you want to come to this community just to get help with 1 thing, and never return, you're welcome to do so. But if you want to get the most out of this community, which we want everyone in tech to do, try helping others along the way as well. Some of the best opportunities come when you help others.
This community is inherently a collaborative exercise as everything will be seen and get the attention of others. We all need to work together to minimize noise and keep the community a high-signal resource for all. This manifests across the following rules:
- This isn't a place for you to make money - This community is free, and we want to keep it that way. Do not ruin this spirit.
- Don't double post across large channels - This is just noisy and creates a really bad experience for a lot of users due to overlap. It's not fun seeing 2 unread channels just to find out the unread post is the same thing twice.
- Minimize self-promotion - We have focused channels like #content-creation, #events-and-scholarships, and stack specific channels for you to promote something you are involved in. Use those instead of broader channels like #random. Too much self-promotion breaks the spirit of this community and will make you look awkward within it.
Posts breaking these rules will be deleted and repeat offenders will be banned.
Rahul and Alex also keep a close eye on who they see participating and helping others within the community, and who isn't. Those who don't participate in this community and are clearly only trying to leverage it for more selfish reasons (there are unfortunately a lot of people who come, self-promote something, and are never seen again) will have these rules enforced more strictly upon them.
Please use Stack Overflow instead.
Alex is a strong believer in: "Don't fix what ain't broke." An extension of this is that you shouldn't try to solve a problem that's already solved extremely well. When it comes to debugging problems, there's already a world-class solution millions use every day: Stack Overflow
If you need help with debugging, please share your problem to Stack Overflow instead and resolve it there. If you somehow aren't able to get an answer there after 2 weeks, you can try getting some extra eyeballs on it, in the appropriate stack related channel like #web, #android, and #backend, by linking to the Stack Overflow post. Make sure to attach a very short high-level description of what your problem is (and a pre-emptive "Thank you" for anyone who bothers to look!) Posts which don't follow this rule will be deleted and directed to this page.
We originally allowed raw debugging posts in this community but found they had very low engagement and are very rarely answered. They also dominate channel real estate, due to lengthy stack traces and code snippets, which made the overall experience bad for everybody. Debugging posts are very tricky in a broad tech community like this, as many people use different stacks. Even with thousands of people, you have an extremely low chance of finding someone who has encountered your exact problem. Debugging requires a lot of time and context absorption; it's rarely something a casual passerby can just see & help solve.
If you've read all the way here, you're amazing! We wish this document didn't have to be so long, but it turns out that there's a lot of complexity running an 11,000+ person community 😆 As a "reward" for absorbing all this content, you can send @Alex a private message on Slack letting him know you've finished this essay and he'll respond with a random parrot emoji, of his choice! We hope you'll like it!