Hello,
So today I continued to look into how I can convert my Markdown blogposts to Sanity documents. I went over the docs and chatted with AI, but after a while, I just couldn't figure it out. That's when I joined the Sanity Slack channel.
My Experience So Far.
I don't frequently ask questions online. One is that most of the time it's just easier to search for the answer or ask an LLM. Sometimes, however, it is way better to either talk to a human or ask for help on Stack Overflow, Reddit, or now Slack. I have tried twice to ask a question on Stack Overflow, both times my question was removed. Now I might just not be looking at the rules correctly but I find it challenging to have to jump through so many hoops just to ask a dang question.
The first time I asked a question I was struggling to use BeautifulSoup, to pull the HTML from a website. I realized that most websites anti bot security would just block me from entering. Totally understandable; but in my case, I was just trying to pull recipe information and was still in the process of learning about sending requests, headers, and other web connection topics, and needed some guidance on how to work around this. Well, I guess I must have phrased things wrong, because I only had three replies. Two criticized me for even asking and one from Stack Overflow closing my question. So that wasn't helpful. Considering that, especially at the time, I had no experienced programmers to talk to about it I hoped I could get some answers online.
The second time I asked a question on overflow was very recently, seeking how other software engineers would approach the issue of converting Markdown to Sanity documents. Well I guess Stack Overflow does not allow recommendations or opinions of that sort. Took the same question to Reddit and faced the same response.
What I've learned
So it's settled, I won't be visiting these websites for advice or help on my projects. I don't mean to be salty about it but I just don't feel as if I can jump through all these hoops to ask a simple question. What I discovered through Slack is that active communities either on Slack or Discord are the way to go. Help channels with the sole purpose of providing a space to ask questions and receive answers is gonna be how I approach things until I better understand how to use these other platforms. That, and as much as possible, asking real people face to face. It's in this long search for a mentor that I ask questions online and I would love to have that kind of guidance on this journey. But we'll see when that day comes.
That's all for today, quick tangent on asking questions on the internet. But glad to be getting back into Sanity and making this website better. More progress on the way!