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I had never seen Julia Evans' writing on the topic but have read ESR's many times. It looks like Evans' guide is mostly geared towards being considerate of the other person and ESR's is mostly geared towards collecting the appropriate information beforehand and phrasing the question the right way. Both are extremely important for effective question asking.

Regarding the "lowly questioner" dynamic, look at it this way: if you're asking someone a question about their software, you're seeking to extract time from someone in order to extract value from something that they created. Be humble.




> It looks like Evans' guide is mostly geared towards being considerate of the other person and ESR's is mostly geared towards collecting the appropriate information beforehand and phrasing the question the right way.

https://jvns.ca/blog/good-questions/ covers both of those topics in detail, in my opinion.




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