Master Banzen was in a neighboring province, visiting an abbot whose brethren had recently won a development contract away from a incumbent. “It has proven to be a hollow victory,” lamented the abbot as he poured the tea. “The code we inherited is a towering mountain of dung, where even the slightest prod buries us up to our eyeballs in a landslide of manure festering with null-pointer excep…

On Stack Overflow and our other code-related sites, creating a minimal, complete, and verifiable example is the best way to get an answer to your question. We’ve always loved JSFiddle and sites like it because they let both askers and answerers reference runnable, working code that demonstrates their problem or solution.

Unfortunately, the use of these external sites introduces a few problems:

If the link breaks, the post becomes worthless.

If the code isn’t embedded in the page, visitors are forced to go elsewhere to get the full content of the question or answer. …