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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

#121

Post by danaliv »

TrianguloY wrote: post #101

For me, and I think the majority, memory is where you keep what your brain thinks that it will use again. If your job is to make and fix/tweak the style of a web page, and you do it practically everyday, you probably can make a pretty decent css file without even looking away from the editor. But if you then need to make a basic html page, you will probably search. If you use an ide with autocompletion, you probably…

> For me, and I think the majority, memory is where you keep what your brain thinks that it will use again.

There's some pedagogical theory around this. (I learned this through the FAA's instructor training.) Sort of common sense stuff, but it's helpful for structuring learning. Basically you'll remember things that you use a lot, have used recently, experienced intensely (e.g. actually used rather than just read about), and had fun learning. In addition, the first way you learn to do something tends to stick.

Cite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_learning

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

#122

Post by allie1 »

onion2k wrote: post #87
yarcob wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a problem when you look up the spelling or the order of arguments in the reference. It's a problem when you search for the solution to every problem with a search engine. So many answers on the internet are written by absolute beginners, who happened to have the same problem, and then blogged about the solution after spending 5 minutes of googling. Sometimes these answers are alright, but often they are shal…

My preferred solution is to buy books. Find the best book on your topic and read a chapter, and you'll learn more than if you had googled 100 questions. Books are also written by amateurs a lot of the time, especially if the topic is a bit niche. I've had people from publishers reach out to me to write a book about things based on a single blog post in the past.

Doesn’t make books bad. It still requires someone sitting down to organize his/her thoughts and do the research.

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

#123

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#124

Post by INTPenis »

I could if I had the framework docs. I have also made a few boilerplate projects to make it easier and faster to get started with simple stuff like Flask modular app and tornado consumer daemon.

If I had a book on each framework I use with their docs reference material I could do without Google.

It's a fun question but can it really happen realistically? I mean if there is still a demand for web apps then there is most likely some sort of way to index the existing web and search it. Even if that isn't google anymore.

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

#125

Post by hrjfkgkgk »

colecut wrote: post #73
ksec wrote: post #50

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 c…

I remain living happily in the old days of PHP, somehow making functioning applications and being paid well. Life is easy and good.

it's hilarious. people using ruby and python and wondering why they cant build web apps without copy pasting stuff off of stack overflow.

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

#126

Post by 908B64B197 »

munk-a wrote: post #96
_the_inflator wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That really depends on how much management there is for hand holding. I expect a good developer to get a ticket to fix the size of a button and be able to follow up with stakeholders about the size of the button next to it. It'd be really weird if we sunk so much effort into ticket writing that everything really was just reduced to a task - at that point the ticket author should just go ahead and fix the thing.

A dedicated ticket to go fix a button. That's a symptom of a pretty dysfunctional org.

If my requirements are that precise I'll farm that to offshored contractors.

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

#127

Post by wffurr »

ksec wrote: post #50

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 c…

In the old days, we had books and offline documentation (CHM, local HTML, man pages, etc.) to supplement our memory.

Things are more complex, but a lot of documentation is also now online instead of printed or distributed on floppies.

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

#128

Post by ganafagol »

I never thought that there is a benefit to working at a shop that is using an obscure, poorly documenyed in-house language. Since most of it is in conventions and institutionalized knowledge, the "core" of it that we actually use/type on a day-to-day basis is so small that it fits into everybody's mind, and it's getting constantly refreshed as well. No temptation to google anything, there wouldn't be answers anyway. And our in-house stackoverflow clone died from not being used years ago.

Wow this sounds terrible. But it's actually an awesome place to work at!

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

#129

Post by dbcurtis »

onion2k wrote: post #87
yarcob wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a problem when you look up the spelling or the order of arguments in the reference. It's a problem when you search for the solution to every problem with a search engine. So many answers on the internet are written by absolute beginners, who happened to have the same problem, and then blogged about the solution after spending 5 minutes of googling. Sometimes these answers are alright, but often they are shal…

My preferred solution is to buy books. Find the best book on your topic and read a chapter, and you'll learn more than if you had googled 100 questions. Books are also written by amateurs a lot of the time, especially if the topic is a bit niche. I've had people from publishers reach out to me to write a book about things based on a single blog post in the past.

In the pre-web days I had a shelf full of O’Reilly books. Everyone did. But O’Reilly has gone down hill, and the popular tools have good on-line doc that is much fresher than a book can ever be.

Technical books have become a dumpster fire. Some publishers (I’m looking at you Packt) are so bad their books are not worth the space they take in a dumpster. Total waste of trees.

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

#130

Post by racl101 »

Depends.

Are you asking if I can make a web app from memory? Probably not.

I have ebooks, I have my Dash app which downloads documentation.

So while, I could technically do it without Googling, I can't do it without documentation. If I can't Google then I'd have to look at documentation and my ebooks.

Why?

Well, I work with a lot of languages and frameworks. I can't commit all these technologies to memory.

Few could.

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