Live data from Hacker News

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

web.eecs.utk.edu

311–320 of 332 posts

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

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> What's a little frustrating is that I'm not really sure how to expose myself to the problems I've never imagined but which FAANG interviewers are likely to ask

Leetcode

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

#312
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.

Terrifyingly, losing your hands or eyes is way more likely than experiencing an Internetless apocalypse, so those would be way more germane software survival skills.

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

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am guessing you're not a native English speaker. This comment is only precipitated by your use of (sic). If you are going to point out others' mistakes like that, it would be better not to make any yourself. There are many ways to rewrite your grammatically incorrect sentence. Here's one: That's literally what I have been hearing since 30 years ago lol Or another: That's literally what I kept hearing for 30 years l…

Please familiarise yourself with the HN Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Please don't dismiss comments for grammar or spelling mistakes. These are not substantial criticisms of the argument being made, and are IMO a form of ad-hominem.

I would be grateful, if you could explain which of the guidelines I may have transgressed. I read them all and searched "grammar". Nothing comes to mind.

My own comment was precipitated by the sneering tone I read in (sic!)

Which itself points out a grammatical mistake unnecessarily. Then compounds this, by making a more egregious mistake.

Really my comment was making the same point. Don't point out grammatical mistakes, which is the precise purpose of (sic).

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

#315
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…

I also still use PHP, Perl, and CGI, for their ease of deployment.

I can make a basic web app without googling.

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

#316
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…

It seems odd to practice things you rarely do. I went one stint where I didn't start a new project for 5 years. Practicing new projects in that time period would have been a whole lot of wasted time.

If you don't do it, how can you know what's going on inside and how it works?

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

#317
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

An alternative way of having offline documentation directly in the browser: https://devdocs.io/

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

#319
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 regularly coded (pre COVID) on transatlantic flights.

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

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Fwiw... My go-to interview question has about four hard spots where people get stuck. I don't really care so much where you get stuck, so much as that you demonstrate good thinking and deploy strategies for getting unstuck once you hit your limit, wherever it might be. And, yeah, points are given for actually getting unstuck. Strategies I want to see are along the lines of 'draw a picture' or 'work a small example, c…

Are you explaining this to the interviewee. Otherwise it's a guessing game for what you want and creates unnecessary stress. If you planning to put people on-call (working under stress and time constraint) on their first day(no prior knowledge of the problem they may encounter) then its fine.

While I'm a decent programer, I perform terrible under these situations. When I get stuck I need to take two steps back (go for a walk, explain it to a coworker/rubber duck).

Post reply on HN