201–210 of 332 posts
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.
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 m…
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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.
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'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…
Why? I'd fire an engineer who took on problems and refused to spend 10 minutes googling around and looking for solutions first.
I have no interest in humoring someone who dismisses the entire internet because it is written by "dumb people." Buying and reading books is how you draw out a project you don't want to work on.
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> There is a strong argument that being good at that isn't required for most SWEs (including at FAANG) Algos/data structures are used as a proxy for problem solving and how fast someone can learn. Plus every decent CS program will have a few courses on it. Also, internal codebases are, well, internal. You won't get a nicely formatted Stack Overflow response on how X works if X is deep in the Google Source tree.
> Algos/data structures are used as a proxy for problem solving and how fast someone can learn. Problem solving, yes. How fast someone can learn, absolutely not. If you've never heard of dynamic programming there's absolutely no way you're going to come up with that in an hour. If you've never heard of binary trees you aren't going to think that one up in an interview. (Of course, you should already know basic data s…
Strategies I want to see are along the lines of 'draw a picture' or 'work a small example, carefully, in full detail.' People who do these kinds of things /usually/ solve the 'hard part' they got to, and I give them a good review, wherever that was. People who don't manage to get unstuck tend to either a) not use simple problem solving strategies and/or b) get overly attached to an initial wrong idea.
(and I totally agree: taking a walk is totally a valid problem solving strategy, though it isn't easy to incorporate into a time boxed interview...)
I enjoy to develop without Googling; really enjoy!
I tried some other amazing things:
- developing without using touchpad or mouse.
- debugging without running code until the end.
- developing with turn offed WiFi.
In general, I'm always trying to reduce my needs.
I think this practices would help me to be more accurate, more independent, and become able to live in a post-apocalypse situation as a geek.
I said post-apocalypse, I remembered lcamtuf article "Disaster planning for less crazy folk": https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/prep/
Also, eventually, what matters is how you connect the bits and pieces you take from online and integrate them into your software. How you design and shape your software so that's its scalable, optimized and reliable is in your hand and that's what matters the most!