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In our contemporary world, people of all ages are coding and almost everyone needs general and specific expert technology help from time to time. Software developers as technology experts are a unique ethnographic community that exhibit particular cultural traits, and who work together according to a previously unwritten yet specific set of rules and practices (Wellman & Gulia, 2018). This ethnographic qualitative study examines how experienced members of a small online software development community react and learn through help-seeking questions of newer members who need support in understanding the idiosyncrasies of a particular software development language (Bosch & D'Mello, 2017). This research analyzes the communications between askers and helpers, seeking to discover why the requests for some coding advice goes unanswered, why other new users receive less-than-satisfactory answers, and still yet why certain new members receive beneficial to highly useful assistance and information regarding their requests (Schueller, Tomasino, & Mohr, 2017). Study implications potentially extend to many domestic and worldwide online learning communities and help create a research to practice foundational knowledge of the best practices for asking for online help in order to receive maximum assistance from the most experienced members of various online help forums.

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