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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

#41

Post by spideymans »

warkdarrior wrote: post #12
sosodev wrote: post #5

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 m…

It matters because SWE interviews rely on coding without googling. Maybe we need to change how interviews are done to test people on their Googling skills. For a given coding task, what do they search for? Do they Google for the right terms? Do they converge quickly on the right website to copy from?

A measure of a good developer is how they choose and utilize tools. I really don’t see the benefit of prohibiting developers from using tools that they’d otherwise have complete assess to on the job

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

#42

Post by ALittleLight »

phkahler wrote: post #16
sosodev wrote: post #5

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 m…

Let's say Elon starts that colony on Mars and you think "Ima move there and write code for a living." You might have the internet, but its 15 minutes each direction. Nothing interactive works, and while they brought copies of Wikipedia, stack overflow didnt package so easily. Or more simply, can you write a web app without internet access?

Do we not have a cached version of the web on the Mars colony?

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

#43

Post by jermaustin1 »

paxys wrote: post #14

I used to program with 6 thick reference books around me. Has memorizing SDKs, APIs, libraries ever been a thing? Or is this just the daily "everything is bad nowadays" post?

Getting a simple application up and running shouldn't be that difficult without scouring reference guides if it is a thing you do.

The number of times I google how to do the thing I'm supposed to do is relatively low, but the number of times I have to google how to fix something that has come up AFTER I did the thing I was doing is probably 90+% of my googling.

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

#44

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

I love googling and stackoverflowing. I know a great deal, but I'm like Kelly Bundy; I can only hold so much in my pretty little head.

I generally forget stuff a week after last using it, and am googling even the most basic things.

In a few days, I'm gonna have to put my Swift code aside for a week or two, while I modify my backend (PHP). I guarantee that I'll be like duuu-uhhh for the first couple of days, with serious Google-Jistu katas.

Then, the same thing will happen again, when I switch back to the Swift frontend.

I tend to avoid using dependencies, so I write a lot of code.

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

#45

Post by mywittyname »

paxys wrote: post #14

I used to program with 6 thick reference books around me. Has memorizing SDKs, APIs, libraries ever been a thing? Or is this just the daily "everything is bad nowadays" post?

Back in the days of PHP, I could develop web apps without references for the most part, using a simple text editor. It's a pretty similar story with Python too, unless I'm using Pandas, I generally don't use reference material much.

Today with node/angular, I'm generally leaning on Google (well DDG) pretty heavily throughout the day. Web platforms seem substantially more complicated today than they used to be. Then again, maybe the mid-aughts was the golden age of programming.

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

#46

Post by _the_inflator »

908B64B197 wrote: post #32
sosodev wrote: post #5

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 m…

That's the reason I do algorithmic whiteboard instead of full blown "real world" coding exercises. I don't care that someone memorized whatever command line syntax to create a new project in whatever framework. That's just rote. Even what we write on the whiteboard I don't expect it to compile. Is it ToString or toString? Can't recall either. What I care about is that someone can ask the relevant questions, come up w…

And afterwards? What is the hired guy then doing? Fixing the size of a button? ;)

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

#47

Post by themodelplumber »

noisem4ker wrote: post #18

Yes, I definitely could do it without Googling(TM). There's plenty of search engines and little need to advertise one in particular by coining a word just for it. Sorry about the snark and completely missing the point of the article.

Yeah, the googling point is kind of strange in that way.

My first thought was, OK I'd probably go back to some projects in my bookmarks db that seemed interesting last time I was looking into web apps. HTMX maybe. That project has some good examples in the docs.

Googling can help in some ways, but it's also casting way too wide a net in others, especially if you keep repeating that step. It's like walking out into the street and shouting, "I WANT TO BUILD AN APP" infrequently, and then wondering why you keep doing this instead of building apps.

Perhaps it would help the author to think more about creating their own process for selecting, refining, and testing methodologies first, then ramp up to building an app second.

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

#48

Post by tutfbhuf »

azhenley wrote: post #26
paxys wrote: post #14

I used to program with 6 thick reference books around me. Has memorizing SDKs, APIs, libraries ever been a thing? Or is this just the daily "everything is bad nowadays" post?

Every interview I’ve done required me to have everything memorized, so it seems this is very much a thing.

But then it's rather a problem with the interview itself.

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

#50

Post by ksec »

I would not be surprised if even Professional Web Developers cant do it. Especially if you include deployment.

This isn't the old days of FTP, Perl or PHP anymore. There are too much information I cant memorise every single bit of it. And I dont think you should either. Especially in the age of Google. My memory capacity has its limit, and there are things I just decide it is not important enough to memorise when I could easily search for it. ( Or if I am relying on Heroku )

I have long thought of Directing a video, where we have famous Developers, or developers from a pieces of software that normal people would have heard of, filming them doing work, looking up silly things in Google. Starring at the screen for hours and absolutely dont have a clue what the code is doing. Not typing any code for hours. Sort of like Reality TV shows for Programmers.

Hollywood Movies and Anime has made the perception that proper Software programmers should be super fast touch typist and typing code with insane speed. It makes people uneasy when they learn programming. It turns out they have to constantly look up some manual, googling, copy and pasting and for most of the time not typing anything. They thought they are just not any good at it and many simply gave up.

The reality is, hopefully the video would show, even top level programmers dont know everything. And it is perfectly normal to look things up.

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