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

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191–200 of 332 posts

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

#192
A basic app? I've been doing this for years and of course I can.

For the things I've mastered I hardly use google anymore, and even that is mostly to check if things have changed since the last time I used them and if there's a new way I didn't know about.

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

#193

A basic app? I've been doing this for years and of course I can. For the things I've mastered I hardly use google anymore, and even that is mostly to check if things have changed since the last time I used them and if there's a new way I didn't know about.

Yeah this is how it is for me as well. I like to see if someone has come up with a more concise method here and there.

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

#194
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My last interview: the interviewers said I was the only candidate who didn't Google any syntax or articles after being given a small 60 min development task from scratch. I was applying for a senior dev role and if I couldn't deliver a tiny web app, I wouldn't hire me either. I could have just solved the task procedurally but I asked if they wanted to see a more OO solution to demo a bit more knowledge. I think back…

Personally I make no attempt to write code without googling. In my position as a robotics engineer my work covers such a breadth that I guess I just outsource my memory to Google. I don’t remember the syntax for many common Linux commands. I don’t remember how bash scripts work. I constantly look recommended ways of solving certain problems. Google is just integrated in to my process.

[deleted]

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

#195

I worked in field robotics and sometimes you would find yourself in a boat without internet fixing robotic software problems at sea. I took 50GB of wiki resources mirrored in my pocket.

Dash is fantastic for this. You can download all of stackoverflow and docs for most languages and keep them on your system if you want to go offline.

https://kapeli.com/dash

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

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm reasonably sure I could write a basic site, make it look as good as I can make things look given my sense of design, without searching. If I was allowed to look at what I already have on my machine I could even set up a build process for my site. If not allowed then no build process. But it would probably be pretty slow to write this, depending on how basic the site was, and it would not be as good as if I could…

> I'm reasonably sure I could write a basic site, make it look as good as I can make things look given my sense of design, without searching. That’s cool if true but until you try it you could be fooling yourself. The other thing is that it’s not really a skill that’s valuable in such a connected age, except in contrived scenarios like closed book coding interviews, maybe.

I didn't say it's a valuable skill, in fact as I said it would be slower for me to do so (which maybe I should have said significantly slower) that's a pretty strong indicator of its lack of value. I should also say it would be worse quality - because if I needed to add some JavaScript functionality I would need to be able to use the syntax I remembered and not what I could look up.

However my confidence that I could do this slowly and of poor quality is that - I started making websites 20 years ago so making and index.html file and linking to each file by hand and I still do this every now and then when making little static sites (like if a site is 4-8 pages I might just do it by hand). And the stuff I look up for sites like that are generally - how do I do this cool thing in CSS.

Admittedly if I did it this way the site I am envisioning doesn't look much better than Berkshire Hathaway's https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/

on edit: also there is some question if one is just allowed to do what one can remember in one's head or if, without using an internet search engine, one can use the stuff one has on local computers and devices? In which case I have some complicated stuff here to reference going back a lot of years, a lot of ebooks, local hardcopy books. So in that case I think I can do just about anything that can be done with search (except for using newest CSS, es2019 features), but still significantly slower.

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

#197
post #187

I worked in field robotics and sometimes you would find yourself in a boat without internet fixing robotic software problems at sea. I took 50GB of wiki resources mirrored in my pocket.

I was thinking about a situation similar to that in web development. But if there’s no internet, a web application doesn’t make that much sense does it...

I'm thinking back to a real dumb django 'web' frontend I built for a raspberry pi camera project once...

The whole idea was to have a page I could load from a laptop attached to the pi via a ethernet cable for quick debugging and interaction. No external internet needed, and did the job decently.

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

#198
post #195

I worked in field robotics and sometimes you would find yourself in a boat without internet fixing robotic software problems at sea. I took 50GB of wiki resources mirrored in my pocket.

Dash is fantastic for this. You can download all of stackoverflow and docs for most languages and keep them on your system if you want to go offline. https://kapeli.com/dash

Too bad that website doesn't specify how much space that all takes. Would be interesting to know.

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

#200
I think the web searching has 3 use cases:

- snippets/usage:

This was done in the past by books. But those days when I’m writing and many languages where some of them aren’t my dailies. This can save me a lot of time.

- cleaner/modernize:

This is equivalent to asking a colleague that’s more seasoned. At least with C++ you discover there’s a brand new std that does that cleaner.

- issues:

We live in a package / deps manager days. Sometimes tiny change breaks your tools. Many times the web searching could save you day(s) of hunting issues that broke due to some dependency or package update.

While the same was also in the old days. You’d naturally had less web deps and less frequent updates.

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