Live data from Hacker News

Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

localghost.dev

11–20 of 399 posts

Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

#11

I appreciate this as some newer developers I have worked with have been concerned that Googling things is something they need to grow out of. Google engineers, being somewhat revered in my Big Corp, Googling things every day would go a long way to encourage them.

I don't think she works at Google. But you make a good point. It's mostly a psychological barrier and largely a result of how the interview process is conducted; in closed rooms, without access to any search engine.

Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

#12

On the list of things I always Google, is how to create a symbolic link under Linux. I just can't figure out a way to remember what comes first; the source or the destination. The man pages add to the confusion by calling the "source" the target. So, the rule of thumb I now follow is cp or mv semantics.

Here's how I finally memorized it: ln has a 1-file-argument invocation, so ln -s ../../a_fine_file will create a symbolic link to that file under the current directory and under the "a_fine_file" file name. The single argument case has to have the file you want to link to as input. That generalizes nicely as the 2-file-argument invocation maintaining the logic.

Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

#14

On the list of things I always Google, is how to create a symbolic link under Linux. I just can't figure out a way to remember what comes first; the source or the destination. The man pages add to the confusion by calling the "source" the target. So, the rule of thumb I now follow is cp or mv semantics.

I always type ln -sT ..., which then helps me remember which one is the target of the link.

Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

#15

On the list of things I always Google, is how to create a symbolic link under Linux. I just can't figure out a way to remember what comes first; the source or the destination. The man pages add to the confusion by calling the "source" the target. So, the rule of thumb I now follow is cp or mv semantics.

I used to Google that a lot. But now I make an analogy with "cp", the second argument being the file that is been created (the simlink in this case)

Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

#16

On the list of things I always Google, is how to create a symbolic link under Linux. I just can't figure out a way to remember what comes first; the source or the destination. The man pages add to the confusion by calling the "source" the target. So, the rule of thumb I now follow is cp or mv semantics.

Here's how I finally memorized it: ln has a 1-file-argument invocation, so ln -s ../../a_fine_file will create a symbolic link to that file under the current directory and under the "a_fine_file" file name. The single argument case has to have the file you want to link to as input. That generalizes nicely as the 2-file-argument invocation maintaining the logic.

Thank you, this is really helpful.

Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

#17
post #3

This is a really interesting peek into the developers mind. Right away I notice I google things differently than the author. I try and hit up phrases that match a question (which is why I probably over index on stack overflow). The author seems to hit up ideas that remind me of something that might be the title of a blog post or something. Also, my search is definitely more full of stack trace keywords. Probably 80%…

Stack traces have been great at fingerprinting the issue, especially to find something on a Github issues page. And the success rate is inversely proportional to how long you have spent working on a project using that dependency. The more time you've had, the more creative ways you find to screw it up.

Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

#18

On the list of things I always Google, is how to create a symbolic link under Linux. I just can't figure out a way to remember what comes first; the source or the destination. The man pages add to the confusion by calling the "source" the target. So, the rule of thumb I now follow is cp or mv semantics.

I have remembered the order of arguments since I figured out that the second argument is optional. So the link name is of course optional, not the original file's one.

Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

#19

On the list of things I always Google, is how to create a symbolic link under Linux. I just can't figure out a way to remember what comes first; the source or the destination. The man pages add to the confusion by calling the "source" the target. So, the rule of thumb I now follow is cp or mv semantics.

Here's how I finally memorized it: ln has a 1-file-argument invocation, so ln -s ../../a_fine_file will create a symbolic link to that file under the current directory and under the "a_fine_file" file name. The single argument case has to have the file you want to link to as input. That generalizes nicely as the 2-file-argument invocation maintaining the logic.

Interesting. Thanks, that's helpful. It's also a necessary approach for using relative paths as targets when you refer to the current directory to add the link in.

Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

#20

On the list of things I always Google, is how to create a symbolic link under Linux. I just can't figure out a way to remember what comes first; the source or the destination. The man pages add to the confusion by calling the "source" the target. So, the rule of thumb I now follow is cp or mv semantics.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN