Can you make a basic web app without Googling? I can’t • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by yarcob » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 8:59 AM UTC

mike_d wrote: post #204

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…

> It's a problem when you search for the solution to every problem with a search engine 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.

Code I've seen at an (at the time) very well known startup horrified me. It must have been written by people with exactly this mindset:

"Why spend time learning all this useless background information when I can just find the answer on google in 10 minutes".

It was obvious that people just cobbled together dirty workarounds that they must have found somewhere on the internet. They used runtime hacks to circumvent limitations in a library API, even though the library was developed by someone else at the same startup, and the runtime hacks were not necessary if the developer had any clue about what they were doing.

Sometimes you get stuck, and searching the web can help you get unstuck.

But the problem is when people just search for the solution to EVERY problem they encounter and never learn the basics because they don't want to "draw out the project".

(Addendum: I'm not dismissing the internet. You can find good information on the internet. But it takes time. The problem is that people take shortcuts, and instead of learning everything they need to know, they just google for the answer to their specific problem because it seems more productive in the short term. Buying and reading books will take longer than copying an answer from Stack Overflow, but it will not take longer than learning sufficiently in depth about a topic by reading blog posts, documentation, etc)

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

#222

Post by renewiltord » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 9:00 AM UTC

Haha, no. The way I see it, I can't remember everything so for most things I bias towards remembering the index and for some things I bias towards remembering the content.

In practice, whether I like it or not, the content for frequently performed tasks gets memorized. So I just need to keep the index well tended.

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

#223

Post by RMPR » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 9:00 AM UTC

easton wrote: post #195

tlarkworthy wrote: post #162

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

While it's not for documentation per se, I think archivebox[0] can be very useful for that use case.

Disclaimer: I never used it, just came across this a while ago and thought it was cool.

0: https://archivebox.io/

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

#224

Post by canofbars » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 9:00 AM UTC

renewiltord wrote: post #222

Haha, no. The way I see it, I can't remember everything so for most things I bias towards remembering the index and for some things I bias towards remembering the content. In practice, whether I like it or not, the content for frequently performed tasks gets memorized. So I just need to keep the index well tended.

I usually only remember there is a thing that does what I want but not its name or exact usage.

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

#225

Post by viseztrance » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 9:01 AM UTC

mike_d wrote: post #201

viseztrance wrote: post #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.

Using notepad or your systems equivalent? I notice a lot of developers rely heavily on autocompleters and syntax hints in the editor, but deny that they need "documentation."

I get where you're going with this, and I agree with the general point.

But my emacs with ctags only does local method lookups, so that's not really my case.

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

#226

Post by nsonha » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 9:01 AM UTC

maybe the browser devtools should be shipped with typescript definitions and mdn docs. If you think they are bloats then another thing to look into would be decoupling the devtools from the browser

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

#227

Post by tlarkworthy » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 9:02 AM UTC

MattGaiser wrote: post #164

tlarkworthy wrote: post #162

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.

What did you include?

The Robot operating system wiki mirror[1] + python resources [2]

[1] http://wiki.ros.org/Mirrors [2] https://docs.python.org/3/download.html

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

#228

Post by zxcvbn4038 » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 9:02 AM UTC

I think this shows the necessity for learning instead of learning to look up. In my early days (pre-Google) my peers would only answer a question if they agreed completely with what I was doing and how. I would have to explain what I was working on from the beginning and every design decision and who had approved them and after all that if they didn’t like the project I was working on or thought it should be done a different way then silence. Books could be helpful but they generally lagged the state of the art by 3-5 years at that time. Between the two it made it very difficult to do anything cutting edge, so I made it my goal to learn as much as possible so that I would never again be limited in what I could do by others. Through the decades this has paid off immensely. Today I do “cheat” and look at Stack Overflow and Google pretty frequently, but if the internet goes out or I’m asked to give an impromptu explanation or overview of something in a meeting, I can carry on and speak with authority.

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

#229

Post by canofbars » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 9:05 AM UTC

kosievdmerwe wrote: post #176

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…

Yeah, so the big problem is every software project has some initial parts you only have to do once and then 99% of the project is just extending and improving the project using the same flow over and over. I don't see the value of memorizing somethings you just do once. That said you're right, even the 99% of work still involves a lot of fiddling and sometimes research outside of writing code.

I have been a react developer for 3 years and I don't even know how you set up a react project from scratch since it was already done when I started the job. I assume its pretty easy with lots of info available online though.

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

#230

Post by canofbars » Sat, Jan 30, 2021, 9:06 AM UTC

baxtr wrote: post #187

tlarkworthy wrote: post #162

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...

Our office lost internet connection for a day. We just connected to our phones and continued on.