How to ask questions on Piazza

Here are some guidelines for submitting a good piazza question.

Public or Private

First decide if your question should be public or private. Most questions not related directly to lab tasks or code you specifically wrote can and should be public. If you are getting a weird git error, if you have some general confusion about a feature of the starting code, if you want clarification of an in lab or in class exercise, or if something about the lab write up is unclear or ambiguous, please make these questions public. Chances are others have the same question/problem and answering it once saves time for the instructor and benefits the largest number of students. If you have a specific question about a piece of code you wrote that cannot be phrased in a more general way, you should make your post private.

Anonymous or not

You have the option to make your post anonymous to students but not the instructor, or anonymous to all. It's perfectly fine if you want to use this feature, but if you ask a question that is specific to your solution, I need to know who you are to look at your git repo, so please don't make this post anonymous to me.

Posting solutions

Don't post large segments of code, even if it is from public examples or in class exercises. Instead, make sure any changes you want me to see are pushed to github and tell me who you are and I can inspect your code. If you want to post small snippets of code, you can enclose the code in < pre> ... < /pre> tags in your post so that it gets syntax highlighted as shown below.

vector<string> ls;
ls.push_back("puppies");

What to include in the content of your question

Vague questions/comments like "My code doesn't work. Why?" are unlikely to get a response. Please try to narrow your issue down to one issue. Describe the problem you are having in contrast to what you expect to happen. Also list what you tried to do already to fix the problem. Finally, make sure you push your changes to github.

An example

The test DoSomethingAwesome is failing, but all previous tests are passing. I've narrowed the problem down to the line myDataStructure->watchThis(). I expected the code to show an animation of a unicorn leaping over a fence and catching a donut thrown by Ruth Bader Ginsburg on its horn. Instead I'm getting a segmentation fault. It seems the problem might be in the helper function callBrokenMemoryManager. We have pushed our code to github.

If you fix things before I reply

Please let me know. Sometimes it is obvious that you fixed the problem after I clone your repo and can't reproduce the error. But if you fix the problem before I reply, please update your Piazza post so I can redirect my attention to unresolved issues.