In May of 2018, Chris Manson and I set out to help improve Ember's presence on Stack Overflow, and I'm excited to share that we're doing it again! Our first livestream of 2019 is Wednesday, May 1st at noon UTC/8am EST.

"May I ask a Question" is a month-long effort that includes livestreams and an invitation for community participation. Chris and I find an Ember-related Stack Overflow question and share approaches to building and debugging, while making a minimal reproduction of the problem and delivering an answer. Our goal is to help make Ember more approachable for beginners and to demonstrate a Q&A style that is centered in curiosity and exploration. We'd love you to help with these things too!

Although we are both members of Ember core teams, this is a side quest for us and is not affiliated with official projects or the organization.

The many sides of Stack Overflow

Last year, when we set out to encourage more participation, we got to see firsthand both the positive and negative sides of Stack Overflow. The Ember section was very chill and seemed great to us, but outside of that zone, there were problems. We got to see how the people behind the project think about the problems that we and many other users encountered. We feel good about continuing this project since there seems to be thoughtfulness and progress.

On the sunny side, we are so inspired by the people who have been consistently doing Ember Q&A over the past year!

The livestream

Our first livestream of 2019 is Wednesday, May 1st at noon UTC/8am EST!

In general, we're livestreaming on Thursdays or Fridays at noon UTC/8am EST. Recordings will be posted after each session.

For announcements of when we are streaming: 

How you can participate

We would love it if more people want to jump in and help answer questions, or upvote the good work of others! The most important thing I can stress is this - figure out what you enjoy, maybe bring along a friend who likes it too, and do that thing. If Stack Overflow sounds overwhelming, maybe it's not your jam, and that's ok. There are so many different, critical ways to support an open source project. It's totally fine (and healthy!) to ignore certain aspects. It's really important to not burn yourself out on trying to pay attention all the time. If you want to give Stack Overflow a shot, here are some tips:

  • Upvote good questions and answers. You're giving people who are already engaged a nice boost, and maybe some additional abilities
  • Include versioning in your answers. The opening sentence should say something like "This applies to Ember 3.x.x, and was written as of 3.1). Future devs will thank you.
  • If you search SO during your daily work and see answers from the past that are now outdated, comment with the modern answer.
  • Join the Ember Community Chat if you want some company, spot an issue that should be modified, or can help with higher level operations like vote to close, editing, etc.
  • Use code snippets whenever possible
  • Help improve the quality of questions - if someone hasn't provided enough information, comment and ask for more. This will help you, them, and anyone else who lands on the question from Google!
  • Link back to the Docs or the Guides or both
  • Be excellent to each other. Every comment you make should be kind, helpful, and true.
  • If you want to receive email alerts when someone responds to your questions and answers, check out your Profile settings
  • Invite people to share their questions in the Discuss forum or on Stack Overflow in order to help make them searchable Abandon ship if you don't like it. Your energy is needed elsewhere.

Thanks for reading!

If you have any ideas for us, you can reach us both on the Ember Community Chat!

About us

Jen and Chris are both volunteer members of the Ember.js learning core team, where they build, write, and maintain public-facing resources for the framework.

Chris Manson is a developer at simplabs. He's the creator of Authmaker and Empress, and is an mentor and Ember.js advocate.

Jen Weber is an engineer at Cardstack. She is an active open source developer, tech writer, and public speaker. She works to make tech a more welcoming industry.