Live data from Hacker News

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

web.eecs.utk.edu

241–250 of 332 posts

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

#241
If you can, the app is too simple. The soft-ness of software means you always have a lot of choices about how to do things, and those things are a very deep tree. Knowing one specific solution is generally not that useful, because softness is about malleability.

The real skill is understanding what you're making. What are the constraints, and of those which are hard to satisfy? Which choices are binding once committed? Everything else is fill-in-gaps, or choose a sane default: "Page needs my corporate background color, can't remember the CSS for it. I need a DB, let's go with pg. I need to make sure passwords are done sanely, let's double check the django docs. For some reason I keep getting an error with the page, let's google it."

It's also a skill to recognize when you have to backtrack on your choices. Maybe you missed the bit where it says "don't use this lib multithreaded" and you have to find another. With some experience your backtracking won't take you all the way back to square zero.

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

#242
post #209

This ability would be a big time saver during development. 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 l…

I thought this was a joke until I realized you were serious; I was expecting that as I read further into the list it would get to "-develop without using my hands" and "-develop with my eyes closed" (which are legitimate situations for disabled developers, btw) but which would be absurd for anyone to practice under conventional conditions.

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

#243
I developed most of my iOS game without internet access (I did it mostly on a train).

I actually did this twice - once using a Mac, xCode, swift, and spritekit. Then the exact same app again using a Linux machine, text editor, C, and SDL2.

Doing things in C was far better - I just opened up the relevant SDL header files when I needed information, and was able to get basically everything non-iOS specific up and running without any internet.

I definitely drew on a fair bit of experience and hunches (e.g. writing audio synthesizers from scratch often involves picking a bunch of magic numbers, and if you pick them wrong it can sound completely awful).

Now I have a mac laptop again, I still would lean towards C+SDL2 over swift+SpriteKit (though I do continue to experiment).

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

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep. I did it yesterday, so can't help replying.

Using Google and GitHub I found RMUIF, which, like many available templates, is based on React's standard create-react-app

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

#246
Great article. In fact the same conclusion brought me to create Assistant extension for Visual Studio Code. It allows you to document your know-how and display it in the source code while you are writing it.

It is not only great for technical knowledge but also for project know how. Also it does not require know how to be introduced to the source code, it is stored separately.

It increased my productivity by 30% because I am not distracted by googling answers again and again.

It is a free extension, so try it out:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tomasz-s...

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

#247

Using documentation is fine. You aren't going to solder stuff only by eyeballing the component packaging either. On-line information? That's another question entirely. This would be a more interesting test: can you make a basic webapp (or other type of app representative of your experience) without Internet access ? If you're dealing with an older stack and toolkit, you probably have many books' worth of manuals alre…

[deleted]

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

#249
Let me give you an example: I often search the internet for the ASCII table. I don't think it's a fault, that I do not remember it. Even if I had it stored in my computer, opening it from a computer would not be as fast as looking it up online.

Another example: the setTimeout(a,b) in Javascript has two parameters: the time delay and the function to call. I never remember which one is the first, so I look it up every time.

I can type without looking at the keyboard. But I believe there can be great programmers, who need to look at the keyboard when they type.

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

#250
post #209

This ability would be a big time saver during development. 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 l…

This sounds like those things you do at work when you're bored.
Post reply on HN