5 Terrific Sites to Ask Your Programming Questions Besides Stackoverflow

This blog post shows you 5 websites where you can ask programming questions and get high-quality answers. These sites are less strict than Stackoverflow in what you can ask.

Table of Contents

• Intro
• Twitter
• Reddit
• Quora
• GitHub Discussions
• Discord/Slack
• Conclusion

Intro

Every programmer who has been coding for more than a week knows about Stackoverflow. It's THE place to ask programming questions and get high-quality answers. Many knowledgeable developers are active there and provide solutions to difficult coding problems for free. Thank God for Stackoverflow 🙏.

But Stackoverflow is not suited for all kinds of questions. Opinion-based questions, for example, are not allowed on the website and will be closed quickly. You can't ask for general guidance or start discussions on what framework or solution to choose for your particular problem.

That doesn't mean other programming-related questions don't have a place—Stackoverflow is just not the right one. In this post, I show you 5 alternative websites where you can ask your programming questions, which are less strict than Stackoverflow.

Tip: It can be a good idea to ask the same question on multiple different sites. This way you not only get answers faster, it's also less likely that something important gets left out. Just don't spam!

Twitter

Twitter seems like an unusual place to ask programming questions, but I use it for that all the time and it works pretty well. Twitter is great for opinion-based questions and for general guidance, but also works for highly technical questions.

When I ask a question on Twitter, not only do I get answers from my followers, but they often also tag other people they know who are knowledgeable in that topic. These tagged people then often feel compelled to respond and show their knowledge. I've gotten free advice from real experts this way, people who would've probably never noticed my question on another platform.

This question would have been closed and downvoted on Stackoverflow

If you don't have (m)any followers on Twitter yet, you can harness hashtags to get attention from people that follow a certain topic. This is also a great way to build new relationships and get to know other people in your industry and topics of interest. If you are a programmer, you should be active on Twitter.

Reddit

Reddit is another great place to ask programming questions, which is less strict than Stackoverflow. The strength of Reddit is its many sub-communities, called "subreddits". There is a subreddit for every programming language and technology out there, many of which have hundreds of thousands of active participants. Unless the topic is very exotic, it's likely that at least one person will respond to your question.

I use Reddit to ask opinion-based questions (e.g. "should I use library X") or ask for clarification on things I didn't quite understand. Thanks to Reddit's voting system, the answer quality is usually pretty high because the best responses get voted to the top.

The React subreddit at https://reddit.com/r/reactjs

Quora

Quora is a huge community for all kinds of questions about pretty much any topic. It has categories for every programming language or technology you can think of. You can ask technical questions, but also opinion-based questions there. Almost everything is allowed.

Quora does a great job of connecting questioners to answerers and actively recommends your questions to users who might know about that topic. Because the website ranks so high on Google, it's a strong motivation for people to show their knowledge and establish themselves as experts in their industry. I regularly answer programming questions on Quora myself.

GitHub Discussions

If you have questions around a specific library, check if the Discussions tab on GitHub is activated for that repository. GitHub Discussions are highly focused communities where you can get help with the usage of a specific library or package. Since it's opened and maintained by the same people who host the GitHub repository, the answer quality is usually very high. It's a great place to ask library-specific questions that require the input of an expert, like how to solve a cryptic error for which you can't find a solution anywhere else.

Discord/Slack

Discord and Slack are both chat platforms where you can create your own servers for free. Many servers already exist for all kinds of programming topics. Often, library authors maintain their own, official servers where you can ask questions and get help.

The answer quality differs quite a bit from server to server. I have joined chats where I've gotten answers from top experts that I would have never gotten in touch with otherwise. There are other servers, however, that are more or less dead. You have to check them out and see how it goes.

To find out if your favorite framework or language has a server on any of these platforms, either look on their website or google for "[framework name] Discord" or "[framework name] Slack". You can usually join them for free but sometimes the owners require you to fill out a signup form beforehand. The Kotlin community does that, for instance, for their Slack server.

Conclusion

The websites mentioned in this post are great places to ask programming questions and get answers from real experts. They don't have the same high (sometimes too high) standards as Stackoverflow and allow you to ask more opinionated questions and questions that have already been asked before.

Of course, this is not an exhaustive list. There are many other programming communities and forums out there and I can't list all of them. However, the ones I mentioned here are the ones I use myself regularly, and where I've gotten answers from top experts in the industry. I'm not a fan of Facebook groups, because I found the answer quality to be really low there.

Lastly, we also have a Coding in Flow Discord server where you can talk with thousands of other developers. It's completely free and I would be happy if you join!