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>> Read the Reference >> Don’t Guess > I find that, when working with a new "thing," I often like to guess for about an hour or so before I really do a deep dive into the reference. Or, I'll read a stackoverflow answer or two, play around with it, and then go to reference. I think that's fair. I've definitely seen "not best" programmers only guess and only read stackoverflow, over and over, forever, and never read th…
The trouble is that there is a strong correlation between being able to design good interfaces and being able to prepare good documentation. Meaning, where guessing fails, the reference is bound to also fail due to inaccuracies or failing to communicate what you need to know. Which stands to reason as both require concern for how the user perceives the product. That is a skill in its own right. In practice, so many t…
Yet, we had engineers who would still just hunt and peck and stumble guess until they either accidentally got it working or they'd ask a more senior guy for help (who would always first say: did you read the documentation?) There was no excuse back then, the documentation was good and accurate, and if you followed it, it worked. Were there hidden dark corners of Win32? Sure, but the 99 percentile developer never needed to even go near them.