Can we have a GUI for that?
Get better at Googling
81–90 of 297 posts
Re: Get better at Googling
#82Not sure how is this related to the SW development, this is just a general set of Google keywords. I might sound like an old fart, but I feel like it is much more helpful to learn your way around the docs as a developer. I regularly see people googling all kinds of basic language knowledge that can be found in documentation. However, googling might lead to outdated or incorrect information, especially when people jus…
This works until you find yourself developing in an environment that moves so quickly that any given archive of docs you have is out of date within a week.
Excellent advice for languages, but might trip a developer up who's working with libraries (especially web development libraries, which release quickly).
Re: Get better at Googling
#83Back before Google, developers actually had to know what they were doing. Most kept textbooks on their bookshelves and cheat-sheets in their notebooks. I've done a lot of work in air-gapped secure facilities where no Internet is available. Whenever we get a new-hire, they must adapt to not having Google as an instant resource. About half of them cannot cope, and they move on within a few months. The half that stay ac…
I started programming before Google but honestly don't see a huge difference. The type of programming I did in 90s (windows networking stuff) was much simpler to grasp than the programming I do today. Back then you could get one out of 100 error codes when dealing with sockets, now I can get a billion error code and that's before node has even loaded a file from disk.
Re: Get better at Googling
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
The academic and scholarly field you are referencing in your first paragraph is referred to as “information literacy“ We’re looking at this and students generally we look for the number of stages that need to be completed: Identification of the need for new information Searching and strategies for finding the needed information. Assessment of the usefulness of the information Evaluation of the credibility of the info…
That's a nice concise list. Even moreso: "You can think of information literacy as having five components: identify, find, evaluate, apply, and acknowledge sources of information" - via https://libguides.seminolestate.edu/researchfoundations/info...
Yup!
Re: Get better at Googling
#85Back before Google, developers actually had to know what they were doing. Most kept textbooks on their bookshelves and cheat-sheets in their notebooks. I've done a lot of work in air-gapped secure facilities where no Internet is available. Whenever we get a new-hire, they must adapt to not having Google as an instant resource. About half of them cannot cope, and they move on within a few months. The half that stay ac…
And back before then, the developers were REALLY hardcore, having stacks of cuniform etched clay tablets strewn about their caves. Occasionally a stack was knocked over, and a developer was crushed. Yes, development has become not only easier over the years, but safer as well.
Re: Get better at Googling
#86In a past life, I was tasked with localization support for a product we were working on.
One of the major challenges was localizing error messages. Since the system was heterogeneous and packed with legacy code, there wasn't really a good way to get the org to adopt a framework for localizing the error strings that myriad backends would emit. So any localization we'd do would end up being some form of "heuristic-match the plain English representation of the error (the only representation we could assume every error supported) and transform it into a localized string."
But we eventually abandoned the task for a simple and very specific reason: someone brought us data that showed that most of our users figured out what to do about our error messages by querying StackOverflow, and we were therefore doing the users a disservice... Since SO can't language-translate one topic to another, we'd undesirably balkanize the aggregated knowledge space if we vended different users different error strings to plug in as search queries!
So for maximum usability, we settled on the surprising solution where much of our UI was localized, except for the error messages, which were intentionally kept in English for maximum concentration of search results.
If you want to avoid this problem in your org, my recommendation (from the position of pretending I was working in an ideal greenfield project with zero legacy code) would be to take the Microsoft-style approach of maintaining a global namespace of unique error code identifiers and emit those identifiers to the user along with ther plain-language error description. It's ugly and "computer-y," so you might get pushback from your UX team, but if you're going to support multiple languages, it provides a hook for services like StackOverflow (and other fora) to aggregate knowledge of an error across different human languages via a language-agnostic representation. At least until StackOverflow solves the hard problem of translating search queries so it can vend answers in a language-agnostic way, and I'm not going to hold my breath on that happening.
Re: Get better at Googling
#87Web searching is one of the most important skills for everyone. The world today seems to me like a place with abundance of tools. More tools than one can imagine. Seems like the frontier separating one from solving any problem, is search. Search for the right tools that surely exist. So tool-searching tool would be a heck of a tool
Re: Get better at Googling
#88Back before Google, developers actually had to know what they were doing. Most kept textbooks on their bookshelves and cheat-sheets in their notebooks. I've done a lot of work in air-gapped secure facilities where no Internet is available. Whenever we get a new-hire, they must adapt to not having Google as an instant resource. About half of them cannot cope, and they move on within a few months. The half that stay ac…
I do all of the above. I can cope without it, but I don't consider Google a crutch. Why not use every tool at your disposal?
Re: Get better at Googling
#89I follow and sometimes advise on /r/learnpython. There are two types of questions on there that make me shake my head. 1. "How do I do this?" The question often that can be resolved with a search. This person would rather wait for an answer than do the work of a simple search. 2. "Will this work?" along with some snippet of code. I have to remind myself that they're often kids that have yet to learn how to learn. Sti…
That is a really interesting point. Experimentation could be taught. There are the various “REPL based dev” rants but experimenting is more general. Although the barriers to entry to each new piece of modern technology seem a little higher. Hello world in Python REPL is a bit easier than a hello world container in a k8s container. I often don’t bother to try out new stuff when I first hear about it because generally the process of getting it to work in the trivial case is 90% of the effort and 90% of the googling
Part of the things you learn to increase your power in various environments is how to achieve certain capabilities in certain environments. Now I know how to set up terraform modules to deploy services on VMs with zero downtime deploys, and plop in some lambdas for end to end monitoring with alerts going to the slack channel. I can implement all our new things we need to deploy without too much frame, I just can worry about the picture. It makes me correspondingly less interested in setting the same thing up on Mesos or EKS or whatever. But eventually you get calls to do some new thing three times and you have to respond.
Fortunatey, we have people that can deploy helloworld in fifty different frameworks (but don’t seem like they can actually write or debug complicated code). They are useful but it is a weird thing to master. All experiments and no new logic wrested into being to do things.
Re: Get better at Googling
#90This is only true really for younger developers who haven’t understood the value of RTFM for software. Web search is less valuable to me as I get older due to experience. It is more valuable to those that don’t have experience and want a playground to say: “if I do this, how can I do it, who else has done it?”
A good example is if I ask a developer to write a MITM proxy server. You can search all day how to write one and you’ll find a few projects on Github. However not a lot of info on the whys and whats. This is because no one wants the responsibility of their work being used in an attack. To get all the whys and whats you need to read documentation for the protocols and language you’re using. Otherwise you will end up with a pretty hack-y solution.
Because there is no stackoverflow on this, a younger developer would spend the greater part of 3 months understanding something simpler than it appears to be.
Search hasn’t made me a better developer so it’s importance is minimal. Best practices have made me a better developer. Searching for solutions is not a best practice.