How I uncover genuine pains in technical watering holes

Note: this post is targeted at my fellow 30×500 students and might not make sense to anyone else.

A common problem students encounter in 30×500 is that we come across watering hole posts that are purely technical and have a short and clear answer.

Example: the question “how do I reverse an array in Ruby?” has a very cut and dry answer: Array#reverse. There’s not much more to say about it. This question isn’t really a pain, just a question.

The kinds of posts I prefer to find are ones that say things like: “No matter how much I read, I can’t figure out how to get started with automated testing. What can I do?” There’s a LOT to say in response to this question. This question reveals pain, pain that can be addressed with an ebomb.

I’ve often used a special google query to help me uncover pains. It looks like this:

rails testing confused inurl:forum

The inurl:forum part scopes the search to URLs that contain “forum”. The “rails testing” part is the topic under which I’m trying to uncover pains, and “confused” is one of several “pain words” I’ll plug into this query. I might run through several, like this:

rails testing confused inurl:forum
rails testing frustrated inurl:forum
rails testing stuck inurl:forum
rails testing confused inurl:reddit
rails testing frustrated inurl:reddit
rails testing stuck inurl:reddit

Here’s the full list of “pain words” I’ve come up with so far:

confused
frustrated
stuck
lost
painful
don’t understand
don’t get
struggling

Once I find posts via my queries, I of course safari those posts and then write ebombs addressing the pains.

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