Grep is one of the most important tools for every developer.
Get better at Googling
191–200 of 297 posts
Re: Get better at Googling
#192I've noticed filetype:pdf no longer really works - tons of sites that require you to sign up for an account before seeing the file. Used to be a great method to find pdfs of textbooks / other resources.
Re: Get better at Googling
#193My first job was writing 68000 asm for the yet to be released Macintosh. I had a list of opcodes and a register list for the chip. I had sparse, unfinished documentation of the Mac ROM. You will never hear me complain about developers using search engines to help them code.
Re: Get better at Googling
#194This is great list, but what is the most important in search is not operators. It is context.
Every time I work with students and they are stuck, I ask them to Google the issue. 9 out of 10 they will write something like: how to upload an image?
Instead, they should first specify the context. Is it an issue on the front end? Are they looking for the correct input type for file upload? Or is it the php method to receive the file on the back end. Or is it in nodejs?
Search engines cannot infer the correct context because there are hundreds of correct answers. So we have to specify:
- nodejs file upload async (no need to talk to it like a human)
- html file upload input type
- php file upload tutorial
Most likely, the answer will be in the first few links.
Re: Get better at Googling
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
A developer who is new to a technology absolutely needs to read the documents. No matter how good or bad, it's important because it probably tells you a lot of stuff you wouldn't learn on your own (or that someone else will teach you wrong). I do a lot of GCP work anymore, and the amount of devs who make service authentication way more complicated than it needs to be is really freaking high. It's clear that the peopl…
Cases where docs are not enough: - Beginners do not understand doc's jargon, or they need to learn too much stuffs to understand it that they'd rather quit. So they end up relying on third party sources/implementations - No English knowledge and no translations
On the other hand: if you are developing software, you're going to have to be able to at least read English, and if you don't understand the jargon, that just means that your starting point isn't just the docs, but also a jargon lookup.
People generally just want to cut corners and 'be done with it' which simply results in lower quality.
Re: Get better at Googling
#196Google is okay for research on how other people have achieved something. But generally these days I am of the opinion it just teaches you bad habits. I really wish people would just read the docs instead of just googling. I am working on a large typescript solution and almost every error in the application is due to the original developers not reading the docs and instead just googling stuff from stack overflow. Also…
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Re: Get better at Googling
#197I'd suggest to change the editorialized submission title, as it predisposes people to share opinions that can easily be unrelated to the article's contents in question.
Changed now. Submitted title was "Googling is one of the most important skills for every developer". It wasn't exactly editorialized, since it's the first sentence of the article (which is often an ok fallback for an HN title) - but I agree with you that it's misleading here, and also still too baity.
Re: Get better at Googling
#198It is no longer possible to use Google well. Once it searched strictly the pages that contained all the words you listed: after some practice, you were able to imagine what a page with the thing you were searching for could contain: that was really a superpower, you could find things that others really had issues finding, and then you could tell other people how to do it. But Google reasons about 90% of users, not 10%. So ti started to introduce semantical inspection of the query. This made many people able to find things more easily, but the top users were left in pain: in some way even using the operators to force matches, it is no longer possible to force google to really do what it did before, find pages having all the listed words, exactly.
Re: Get better at Googling
#199Perhaps someone could add some clarity but isn't it true that Google has, over time, begun to ignore the specific operators? Double quotes used to work but I now find that Google ignores these. For me at least, this has made Google less useful over time.
Re: Get better at Googling
#200I remember when adding + to a keyword forced it to be present in the results. Then they changed that because of google+ to be keywords in double quotes.
Now google completely ignores that. It seems like searching gets dumbed-down by the year