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Can you make a basic web app without Googling? I can’t

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Re: Can you make a basic web app without Googling? I can’t

#3

Post by azhenley »

core-questions wrote: post #2

> To be fair, I'm not a web developer Kind of a non-article. Could I make an outdoor irrigation system, fix my head gasket, or anything else complicated without doing some research?

Author here. I'm a professor that teaches software engineering and occasionally web development, sooo I think your comparison is inapt...

Re: Can you make a basic web app without Googling? I can’t

#4

Post by auslegung »

core-questions wrote: post #2

> To be fair, I'm not a web developer Kind of a non-article. Could I make an outdoor irrigation system, fix my head gasket, or anything else complicated without doing some research?

The rest of the quote is quite relevant.

> To be fair, I'm not a web developer so I'm not entirely shocked by this. I only have the itch (and time) to throw together a small web app about once every 6 months.

A better rebuttal is, do you make a [small] outdoor irrigation system or fix a [simple] head gasket "once every 6 months"? I added the adjectives to better compare to his stated "small web app".

I think it's reasonable to expect someone who "throw[s] together a small web app about once every 6 months" to be able to do it without googling, but it isn't how software development is taught. When studying something to master it you start with the basics and do them over and over until you understand them. We don't (tend to) do that in software development, I think for two primary reasons: 1) there's more "important, urgent" things to do and 2) things change so quickly that probably half of what you learn today will be unused in a year (of course if you learn the very basics those rarely change, but I'm talking about the things we all know change so frequently, but were good decisions at the time)

Re: Can you make a basic web app without Googling? I can’t

#5

Post by sosodev »

Does it actually matter if I can? Is using reference material a bad thing?

Edit: I know the article touches on that idea briefly but my argument would be "of course it doesn't matter".

Sure, I could develop slightly faster with a more encyclopedic memory but I really doubt it would make an observable difference in the long-term.

Most of my time isn't spent referencing libraries or syntax but instead I spend most of my time thinking out the logic and higher level relationships of my code. I suspect that is largely the case of any development even remotely non-trivial.

Re: Can you make a basic web app without Googling? I can’t

#6

Post by ALittleLight »

I think I'd be able to do this, especially from my desktop where I have the code for many basic web apps to look at if I need to (which feels a bit like cheating). I am also not a professional web developer but I make random websites sometimes for fun.

Re: Can you make a basic web app without Googling? I can’t

#9

Post by dusted »

I can, but it will be basic! I might have to use a JSON file for the backend because I probably can't remember any database libs well enough to use without documentation.

However, lots of programming is much closer to plumming than to.. programming.. any time you're using a lib or api, you're just looking up what kind of fittings that comes with and what length of pipe to attach to it.. So don't worry about not being able to do anything really useful without looking in the docs :)

Now, if you have to look up basic language syntax for the language you use every day, I'd say its bad and you probably need to practice a bit ^_^

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