One of my favorite tools for learning is asking questions of all the awesome people I know!

what’s a good question?

good questions:

• are easy for the person to answer
• get you the information you’re looking for

Here are some strategies for asking them:

• state what you know
  person 1: so, I know when the database gets a lot of writes, the hard drive can’t keep up.
  person 2: that’s right! I don’t think that was) our problem, though. Look at this…

This helps because:

• I’m forced to think about what I know
• I’m less likely to get answers that are too basic or too advanced

Guessing the answer:

• makes me think!
• helps my coworker see what kind of answer I’m looking for

guess what the answer might be
person 1: Do we have 5 load balancers because we get a lot of HTTP requests?
person 2: actually, we just want to be sure it’s ok if one goes down.