We (me and your TA's if you are in class or the more senior students and postdocs in the research group) are in the business of helping you learn. We do welcome your questions and being helpful to each other is part of the Code of Conduct in my research group!
Please try to help us managing the workload by asking (computational and coding) questions the right way, and by making some efforts to find a solution on your own before you come to us. Turns out this workflow, which minimizes our effort, also maximizes your learning.
If you come across an error message, in bash, Python, or in whichever software or language you are working, the first thing to do is to actually read the error. I know there is a small sense of panic and defeat when you get an error, which makes you want to throw the towel and reach for assistance, but error messages are your friends! Or at least they are designed to be (some are more useful and clear than others of course) -- you should go beyond the word 'error' or the word 'fatal' and try and understand what the software is complaining about. Many pieces of software will offer details about the error, try to identify the culprit, and propose solutions to you. In Python, the error message will report which line of code is responsible for the erre. Do reread the code (that line as well as the lines before and after!). Git always gives you suggestions on what to do to address an error.
The next thing is reread the error, every time! Even though after you change something you still have you should not assume that it is the same error. Your code, just like mine, just like anyone's, is blooming with bugs like a warm summer night in NYC (even when it works, and even when it gives the correct answer, it's still buggy, you can bet money on it!). As you solve one issue others may come up. Read the error message every time - it may be different than the previous one even if the code breaks in the same point. Sometimes the end of the error is the same ('fatal error, I refuse to do whatever you tell me to do') but it refers to a completely different issue. If you tell us the solution we suggested had no effect, we will go look into the problem and try and figure out another solution. If it turns out in fact we had solved the problem days ago, and something else entirely was also wrong, that is a waste of our and your time.
Also, look around! Look on the class resources, announcements, slack, to see if the problem was encountered by your classmates and was solved. Google it, and look on http://stackoverflow.com/. By all means, if you find solutions that are not clear to you, or you do not a find solution, come to us. But try to solve the problem yourself first, because I assure you will learn more that way.
Lastly: give all the information tht is needed to help you. That is a tough one: it takes some time and experience to figure out what the person on our end needs to know about your error to be able to understand it. While coding you get obviously very intimate and familiar with your code... it is easy to lose sight of the fact that on the other end we know little to nothing about it! If you have an error on your terminal copy and paste and/or share a screenshot of
- what the command that causes the error is, and
- what the full error is. If it is code you are running,
- make sure we have access to the code to inspect it (share it on GitHub) whenever possible,
- tell us which platform you are working on, Google COlab, or locally on a Linux, Mac, Windows (git bash or something else...), which versino of python you are using etc.
Otherwise it's gonna be garbage in -> garbage out. I recommand you look on http://stackoverflow.com/ to get a sense of how people write questions the proper way, and by all means not everyone does. Look at the replies and see if the users that are trying to answer need a lot of additional material, or if they are complaining about the format of the question. Note that http://stackoverflow.com/ can be a pretty toxic environment and people do tend to become confrrontational and patronizing if questions are not asked correctly. While I encourage you to get a sense of what is the right way to ask a question by figuring out what people complaint about when questions are asked it is never ok to be cofrontational or patronizing when helping others so this statement is not an endorsement of toxic behavior on stackoverflow and while you learn how to ask a question please do not learn these behaviors (which are against the Code of Conduct of my class and research group and many other scientific organizations Codes of Conduct).
In summary, help us help you!
Have a great day!