251–260 of 332 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally agree. It's a practice of resilience, even if you don't do it most of the time (because googling is indeed usually a massive time saver).
About googling, I meant to be master of the subject; as when you want to write a for loop and you do not google for that. So not googling is a time saver here.
Of course you can't build an app without consulting documentation. Why do you think references even exist? Nobody can store all the knowledge in their head.
But doing it without the very specific questions (ie. Stackoverflow), that's a different question. This should be possible imo. But in my experience it is increasingly not possible. Many, many so-called engineers reach for this as their primary source of information these days.
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…
Let's say Elon starts that colony on Mars and you think "Ima move there and write code for a living." You might have the internet, but its 15 minutes each direction. Nothing interactive works, and while they brought copies of Wikipedia, stack overflow didnt package so easily. Or more simply, can you write a web app without internet access?
Sounds wonderful :P
After two years of doing Rails I still regularly have to look up methods like 'select' on an array / active record collection, the various group, group_by, find, find_by, max, max_by, tally, partition and loads of different Ruby or ActiveSupport methods, the routing DSL, migration-related methods...
React on the other hand never got there for me. I suspect that it’s the many libraries awkwardly glued together (ugh react-redux), with often complex APIs that makes it difficult.
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…
Plus, these questions give me a great reference for next year when I am doing something similar but have forgotten the details.
This approach probably works well because I know how things work at a high level; I think it would be disastrous to do this without any real understanding.
Even if I could, I would not call that an achievement. In programming, we are expected to understand concepts, not memorize documentation of a library. Of course, if you are too specialized working with few libraries/frameworks, you will naturally end up knowing its methods by heart. But that doesn't mean searching things up online is a bad practice. In fact, I believe it is more useful to keep updating yourself from…
While true, it would be reasonable to expect to have one single documentation that is sufficient, and not to have to resort to searching aka googling.
If I quickly need to know how to get the last item of a list in yet-another-language, Stack Overflow will provide me an answer in about 2 seconds.
The documentation will certainly provide the answer too, but I'll need to look at several places etc., since the format is just not optimized to answer exactly this question fast.
Totally not a problem in the world of .NET + Visual Studio. Create new project -> web site -> you get a template filled in with auth and minimal database. No need to google function arguments, because in statically typed language autocomplete provides nearly 100% discovery. CI style deployment would be a problem, but manually you can deploy from the project menu.
Even if I could, I would not call that an achievement. In programming, we are expected to understand concepts, not memorize documentation of a library. Of course, if you are too specialized working with few libraries/frameworks, you will naturally end up knowing its methods by heart. But that doesn't mean searching things up online is a bad practice. In fact, I believe it is more useful to keep updating yourself from…
Warning: weird analogy is coming up. I learned to write java code (structure, basic io (terminal, file, datastructures) blind like in word or notepad and it would run without errors for a google interview; It is not that much you need to know actually but when you learn it once, it lingers around for quite a long time and it gives you a different feeling of confidence that you actually know java (i was writing java c…
Does education work in a similar fashion? does being very good at solving very specific timed algorithm problems at a whiteboard translate to being a good software engineer overall? If that's all you trained for, you will be just very good at that.