Compilation of Foreign Programming Question Sites

A compilation of useful sites for programming questions in English. Below, we’ll introduce the most representative Stack Overflow (SO) and Stack Exchange, the general forum site Reddit, question site Quora, programming forum CodeProject, and paid question/mentor platform CodeMentor.

For example, do you know the difference between stackoverflow and stackexchange? Stack Overflow is one of the services within Stack Exchange. If you work with Ubuntu, you’ve probably seen Ask Ubuntu, which also belongs to the Stack Exchange group.

However, since the genres and sites are different, we can’t just explain it as “only Stack Exchange”, so we’ll treat each Stack Exchange service as separate entities.

stackoverflow

http://stackoverflow.com

The familiar one. When it comes to programming, it’s Stack Overflow. The downside is that accounts get banned easily.

stackexchange

Reference: All Sites - Stack Exchange

Bitcoin Stack Exchange

Questions about Bitcoin and blockchain. The site scale is small.

Mathematics Stack Exchange

Questions about mathematics. People doing deep learning might find this useful. Also for R and statistics. The site scale is large.

Web Applications Stack Exchange

Questions about web applications. I looked into it thinking there would be a lot about Rails, but there wasn’t much at all orz Stack Overflow seems better. The site scale is small.

WordPress Development Stack Exchange

WordPress-specialized question site. The site scale is small.

Super User

Hardware-related questions, middleware like Excel, and general questions about OS like Windows, Mac, Ubuntu. The site scale is large.

English Language & Usage Stack Exchange

This is not related to programming, but I’ll introduce it anyway. Questions about English usage. Like “what’s the difference between decide and determine”. Apart from English needed for error resolution or Google searches, it might be useful for programming-specific naming of variables and files. The site scale is large.

Spanish Language Stack Exchange

This is not related to programming either (just my hobby). Spanish language questions. The site scale is small.

By the way, for language-related questions, Reddit and Quora are fine, but I think HiNative’s question forum and WordReference’s forum are also useful. Questions on SE tend to have more language-related elements involving systems and coding.

Ask Ubuntu

Questions about the Ubuntu distribution of Linux. Like the Unix Stack Exchange, there are many command-line related questions. The site scale is large.

codementor

A site where you can get 1-on-1, one-on-one programming help starting from about $15 for 15 minutes (about 1500 yen). For example, you can receive support via text chat, voice chat, or remote desktop.

English ability and money are required, but it could be useful when you’re really stuck.

When working on complex projects like Rails, you show your Rails code piece by piece to resolve errors.

For example, you can’t put your main project’s source code on GitHub and ask on Stack Overflow where it’s wrong, right? Whether it’s business-related source code or privacy-related source code, it’s obviously not good to openly share important source code. Also, questions, answers, and content posted on Stack Overflow automatically become Creative Commons licensed (CC BY-SA 3.0), so you definitely can’t post corporate secret code. And first of all, I think there would be few people willing to answer that.

There are no sites like this in Japan. Or, there are services like Time Ticket, but this isn’t programming-specialized, so I think you can only ask really simple questions, like “please teach me how to make a WordPress site”.

If you can do English, I think it’s overwhelmingly better to compete in English.

CodeProject

Quick Answers - CodeProject

More of a forum site than a question site. It functions as a question site too, but there are a bit few questions.

In terms of users, it’s above Stack Overflow.

Quora and other question sites

Quora

A site like Yahoo Answers. There are as many trivial and silly questions as Yahoo Answers. On the other hand, there are many serious questions, answers, and academic content, so if you’re careful about the category you post in and the quality of your writing, you can expect decent answers.

However, expect a low answer rate.

Reddit and other forum sites

Reddit is a foreign forum site. It’s often compared to the overseas version of 2channel (2ch) in Japan, but personally I think it’s more like a superior version of Yahoo Answers. Anyway, it’s a site that 98% of English-speaking netizens know or have used.

By the way, Reddit was published as open source… unfortunately, this is a bit of old news. The prototype of Reddit might be published somewhere as source code.

Reddit has countless subcategories called subreddits, and there are a fair number of programming question subreddits.

For example, here’s a general JavaScript one:

Learn Javascript

Here’s a general programming one:

AskProgramming

Note that some subreddits filter posts from new users or users with low scores (karma).

The answer rate is higher than Quora but lower than Stack Overflow. However, for usage distinction, Stack Overflow tends to require formal questions and questions of certain quality, but on Reddit, even silly questions and doubts tend to get answered without much downvoting or low ratings.

It’s recommended for cases where you don’t know what question to ask, don’t know what you don’t know, or aren’t confident in the quality of your question.

Summary

To introduce my personal programming problem-solving workflow, it goes as follows:

Google the error or problem. Read Reddit, SO, etc.
Review your environment

For example, try on Linux instead of Windows, try changing Python versions, try on actual hardware instead of WSL or Virtualbox, try building the environment from scratch with Docker to isolate the problem, etc.

If you imagine the “assumed” environment that many others are probably using and try again on that, you might surprisingly find the cause of the problem.

Ask questions on Stack Overflow or SE (Stack Exchange)

Summarizing the problem and writing explanations is time-consuming work. Before moving to this stage, do steps 2 and 1 to some extent.

Most problems should be resolved by this point.

Open an issue on GitHub

If you asked a proper question on Stack Overflow but no answer came, or an answer came but the answerer also doesn't know the solution, it's rather possible that it's a bug in that environment, language, framework, library, or plugin.

If there’s a GitHub, consider posting a bug report or issue.

Or if there’s no GitHub, if it’s a fairly large project, there should be some forum, so search for a bug report category there and consider posting.

Ask questions on Reddit or Quora

You can wait for answers once you've opened an issue on GitHub, but at this stage, problem-solving is quite difficult, answers are unlikely to come, or it's stage 5/5, so simultaneously with posting to GitHub, cross-post or multi-post the same kind of question you posted to Stack Overflow to Reddit or Quora with slight edits as appropriate.

This is a “last resort” approach, but surprisingly the answers can be helpful, and it doesn’t cost much additional effort, so it’s good to do.

Pay money to solve it

Ask other programmers for help solving the problem. A representative example is [codementor](https://www.codementor.io/r/CF77QLRPXH) introduced above. Depending on the case, it might cost $20, $100, or even several hundred dollars, but if it's a problem you absolutely need to solve, it should be worth it.

Or, if you’re uncertain whether you can solve it by working hard for another 10 hours, it can be considered a good idea to spend 30,000 yen (for example, at 3,000 yen per hour) to ask for help rather than waste 10 hours.

Give up

If this doesn't work... Let's stop once.

Not joking, forgetting the problem and stepping away is actually one very effective solution method. Probabilistically speaking, at a very rare probability, but certainly, problems that absolutely cannot be solved, are almost impossible, are things you’ll eventually encounter if you continue programming.

When you encounter this kind, it’s best to ignore it and forget about it once. Trying to absolutely solve it blindly at that time is too time-inefficient. (It’s also bad for mental health)

3 months later, or a year later, when you encounter the problem again, or suddenly remember it, and just think about it a bit, or just Google search, you can often solve the problem you struggled with surprisingly easily.

Please use as reference.