Ask For Help In No-Code - Easier Than You Think!

No-code development often has us pushing the boundaries of doing things that we didn't previously know how to do. Right? Because you were expert in one field and now you bring some more technology to it. You are a no-coder, you bring some code to it. You're an engineer and you're bringing some of these new tools to it. And these tools, which are very, very visual, which makes them easier to work with, sometimes makes it a little bit harder to express in words what it is we're trying to get done. I find asking for help is a skill and it's also a skill that can be trained and something we work on quite a bit over at State StateChange, and I'm sharing that with you today. My name is Ray Deck. I'm a data scientist by training. I've got 25 years of working in building software startups and leading technical teams. I run StateChange, which helps people solve the hardest 5% of their problems. And sometimes it can be hard to ask for help. Let's talk about how we can ask for help. I find, you know, having done this quite a bit and worked with various, you know, both junior and senior engineers, I find that there are a few key principles that really matter here. When we're asking for help, we need to be very clear about what it is that we want to be true. What is the state that we are currently blocked from? It can be super clarifying to just describe where it is that you're going, either in a post or a video or just when you're talking to the person, because they don't know what you want to have happen. You're just saying, oh, this thing doesn't work. That doesn't actually help me help you. Right. But if it's a, I want this to happen, but it's not happening, that is going to allow us to narrow in on like the nature of the problem. A second thing that's really important is, is describing what you are currently seeing that you do not want to be true. Getting really specific helps a lot here. Like what is the error message that you're getting? This facilitates asking for help, both by giving whoever you're talking to more data to work with, but also frankly, it might even give you more data to work that you can go punch into a robot like ChatGPT or Google or what have you, the specific error codes and, and pasting more of the message and sort of allowing allowing the robot to sort of, you know, filter out that part that might be super specific situation versus a bit more generic. That allows you to make use of things like, you know, Stack Overflow or, you know, other resources that might be out there on the web or being surfaced through the resources that you are directly making, directly talking to. I'll also say that describing what you're doing can be sometimes hard to do in words beyond just the immediate message. And this is where creating a video really helps. And the video is such a key aspect to this. Something we use all the time at JChange when we're, when people are asking for help. So here's an example of someone who wants to sort of link two of these backend systems together to be able to do more of a low-code type environment. And the, and he's using a system that is called Loom, which is wonderful, has a free tier. You should make use of it. It allows you to make like videos up to, I think, maybe 5 minutes, which can be perfectly adequate for posting up a request for help, like on a forum or shipping it to a friend over Slack or whatever it turns out to be. And so, you know, you can see he's not using all that many words, but describing what the immediate problem is. And then, you, he sort of provides a link over to the Loom video. Now, Loom videos often have support for oEmbed, so they often show up directly inside the forum. But even if it doesn't, you can click through it and you can go see what's going on with the video. Now, he does his video really well. And there are a couple things I want to bring to your attention to it. The first is, I want you to notice that I watch these videos at like 1.7x or 2x or what have you. And I'll actually skip through them because I'm trying to find what are the key pieces of information that he is showing that he isn't necessarily telling, because usually the stuff that he can tell when he's talking into the video, that's gonna be the thing he can probably describe through ordinary text as well. The key, the added value is going to be what's sitting in these screens, right? So if I just sort of press play here, you know, we can start to skip through it a bit and see exactly what it is he's doing. And we can start to see little details, you know, as we, as we go through it, if I were to play it, see like exactly what messages he's getting out of XANA, which can be super, super helpful. Be able to see exactly what's going on on the other side. What I recommend, especially in system, in a lot of these no-code systems where like the, it's not just text you're creating, right? It's like this nested set of directives. Like here you have the top level function, stack that you click on, you're able to sort of get, you know, the stuff that goes on in that sidebar, like you see over here, be able to see the results. I would encourage you just to click through all of those and show them on the screen, even just for a couple seconds. See, the goal here is not to be teaching me what all these things do and why, but to show what they're doing, because that can give, you know, your expert or your friend who's out of context or what have you, the information, let them say, oh yeah, I see what's going on here. And because I'm watching it with a video, just like I'm doing right now, I can freeze frame it. So that which you put on the screen for a couple of seconds, I can have on the screen for a couple of minutes. And what usually happens when someone is asking for help is I am going to, uh, you know, watch it at a high speed, find, okay, where do I think sort of is the thing that probably isn't working? And then spend more time probably on what was originally 10 seconds of the video by pausing. And then letting it scroll a bit and pause again. So the, so the more complete you are in terms of the way that you show this sort of walking through, scroll, walk through, scroll, click, click, that, that allows the person who's going to be giving you help to be providing that help in a much quicker fashion. Otherwise, you wind up with things you've probably seen in a bunch of forums before, where like people ask for more clarifying information and what's going on. Just using the video allows you in only a couple of minutes to describe with great deal of precision and clarity What's going on in your situation. Now, that's not exactly what you want to make happen, but that's what is what's happening, right? So that's the part 2 of how to ask for help is describing what's going on and giving that greater degree of specificity. Using the video to be able to show the wider expanse and using text, copy and pasting, particularly the error messaging question or the bad output or whatever it is that can give you, you know, a better idea, right, of what the actual challenge is inside this particular situation. So if we go back over to the, you know, big 3 of how to do this, you know, what am I seeing that's not what I want? The video is the biggest thing to help with that. And then finally, sharing what you've tried. Now, this often gets rolled into the video as well, like, hey, here's the thing I tried, and then you show doing it. And then here's the thing I tried to show doing it, be able to show the variance in the answers that you got. That can often help whoever it is identify the Maybe one of them was on the right track and just not quite working right. Maybe none of them were on the right track. But if you share that again, do it through a show rather than tell. This is where the video once again becomes super helpful. You can, you know, endow, you know, the person who's giving you that help with context that lets them give a more useful next step as opposed to, you know, sharing something very generic and they give very generic advice, which of course is very generic advice you've already seen on the web or whatever. And then that doesn't necessarily help you make as much progress. You have to have those few rounds of specificity. If you just start by taking a couple minutes, make the video, describe what it is that you want, use the text for that. Describe the specifics of the error message or bad result, you know, copying and pasting that so you have great clarity. Use text for that. And then use the video to share the, and here's what I'm trying, and probably quite a bit of the things I've You know, the efforts I've done so far to work around it. This will help you communicate to the person what help you need and will put them in a much better position to do it. And we do this all the time over at StateChange. Like when we talk about Loom-enabled forums, we're talking about this. The, you know, people are describing what they're doing and maybe a couple of paragraphs and then allowing the video to both share directly as well as making use of like the AI summaries that come out of it to describe more of, um, of what's inside. And we sort of put all those things together to allow people to make a lot more progress. Now, one final trick. Um, when you've written this or created the video, watch it. Uh, sometimes you'll find your own answer. Um, this is a structure that creates clarity around the problem. And that clarity is sometimes what people really need in the first place. I can't tell you how many times people have said, well, I, I put together the video for State Change, and then I was able to solve my own problem because just going through that discipline allows you to go from point A to point B. Now, I'm not going to tell you that happens all the time. Maybe it doesn't even happen most of the time, but you get a shot at it if you pay attention to what you said for yourself, and you get a much better shot at being able to get help from others. We encourage people to do this in a paid group like State Change, where we really focus on the hardest 5%. But if you bring this discipline of what do I want to be true? What am I seeing that's not what I want? What have I already Tried and putting a focus on showing through the, the actual error message that's being displayed as well as the, you know, using the video to show the context of it and allowing, you know, just having that greater specificity to the videos or giving that walkthrough in that kind of fast, just a couple seconds on screen kind of way. You will be able to get so much more help so much faster. And that really is the mission that we have to be able to help people make that kind of high-speed progress. I'd love to know what you do to ask for help and what you have found to be most effective. Uh, if you have thoughts on this, please leave them in the forum below. And if you're looking for more help from your peers and from experts, I'd encourage you to check out Stay Changed as well. Until then, see you next time.