Even faster than googling it up is searching through evernote or whatever app you've used to organise your cheatsheets. Evernote has become my external and more organised storage for my brain.
The best programmers are the quickest to Google
161–170 of 205 posts
Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google
#162This is something that bugs me about whiteboard-style interviews - they test almost none of the typical day-to-day aspects of programming. Without Google, without docs, without a REPL, without the code-run-debug cycle, how is it that you think you're assessing how effective I am in real life ? EDIT: not to mention that you're also not testing me for one of the most important abilities of a coder in a software shop: h…
A good whiteboard interviewer will be those things for you. And language details are less important -- "well, let's both agree a for loop has this syntax for now"
"A good whiteboard interviewer" is an oxymoron.
Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google
#163Yes and no. I'm a co-founder of http://devbootcamp.com so I see this every day in the context of people learning to be programmers. "The best programmers I know understand how to architect and build large projects piece by piece. They can focus on the macro because don’t get hung up in the pieces. They know how to use Google to find solutions fast. DRY." I agree with the first and second bit and strictly speaking the…
Let me give a non-programming example. It took me the best part of the weekend to drill twelve holes for curtains - because it is not enough to Google for the answers. Now, if you knock on a wall and it sounds hollow - you just google for hollow wall fixings. Great. I'll go buy some of those. Drill into the wall. And hit brick behind the plaster. Err... Ok they have invented a new type - dry lined Walls. The gap is s…
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Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google
#164>why in the world would you want to spend 2 hours trying to figure it out yourself? I am sure a large portion of HN-ers (myself included) enjoy doing exactly that. I want to spend my day solving problems , not googling shit.
Google is one of many tools that can be used to solve problems. IMO it's generally one of the more efficient ones.
Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google
#165I sat with a newbie programmer the other day. We sat there and made good use of third-party libraries, frameworks and code to get things moving, and concentrate on the core problem at hand. Now, we had to Google a bit to install the third-party and dependency stuff, and tinker with configuration to get it all ready. Eventually we delivered the GUI version of 'Hello World', and the newbie programmer had already progre…
The newbie's statement sounds like a romantic platitude.
You should've shown the newbie programmer that programming is the art of abstraction and that there was never a pre-modern era where "we" were all toiling away with omniscient domain knowledge.
We lean on other people's abstractions because we're mortal and the things we decide to abstract have a surface area that overwhelms the problem we're trying to solve.
Rather than being poorer for it, we're immensely enriched with the ability to solve the problems of our domain with the same vernacular that expresses our problems. Total providence.
Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
But they key to becoming a non-beginner are the first two bits, not the third. It's developing that filter experts have which separates relevant information from irrelevant information. Lots of beginners use Google in a backwards sort of way, having been trained to "look for the solution." It's not about memorization, then, it's about this compression algorithm we call "being an expert." I think this goes pretty much…
It's not only knowing how to filter the results, but knowing what to Google for in the first place. Often results will be different if the search uses slightly different terminology, and knowing what the right terminology to use is requires a little bit of domain knowledge. Once you have the domain knowledge, not only is it easier to determine what results are more likely to yield useful information, but you also get…
It's about knowing what you don't know. There are unknown unknowns and known unknowns.
Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google
#167The best ones are those who know _solutions_ exist or what to google for.
Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure what your point is. What is the image, and what is the actual object?
I was replying to wting, but HN doesn't let me reply to a reply by the same author as a way to combat back-and-forth style arguments, I guess. He said that experts doing that is "trained pattern matching gained through experience, i.e. machine learning." But that's backwards: machine learning in this style is a model of something we observe in ourselves. The thing that's in us is the pipe, the machine learning algori…
You have to either wait a few more minutes till the "reply" link appears, or simply click on "link" link(!) and write your reply there.
Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google
#169>why in the world would you want to spend 2 hours trying to figure it out yourself? I am sure a large portion of HN-ers (myself included) enjoy doing exactly that. I want to spend my day solving problems , not googling shit.
Doing that occasionally between projects, or regularly on your own time (a.k.a. sharpening your saw) is essential to improving as a programmer
But in the context of programming as a job (which is the topic of the post), if one repeatedly spends hours solving already solved problems simply because "one enjoys it", it's a waste of the team's time.
[using old-fashioned "one" here instead of "you" not to make it personal]
Re: The best programmers are the quickest to Google
#170Yes and no. I'm a co-founder of http://devbootcamp.com so I see this every day in the context of people learning to be programmers. "The best programmers I know understand how to architect and build large projects piece by piece. They can focus on the macro because don’t get hung up in the pieces. They know how to use Google to find solutions fast. DRY." I agree with the first and second bit and strictly speaking the…
Let me give a non-programming example. It took me the best part of the weekend to drill twelve holes for curtains - because it is not enough to Google for the answers. Now, if you knock on a wall and it sounds hollow - you just google for hollow wall fixings. Great. I'll go buy some of those. Drill into the wall. And hit brick behind the plaster. Err... Ok they have invented a new type - dry lined Walls. The gap is s…
I've always believed that being a software developer taught me not to DIY my home improvement. I recognize the finer points are subtle enough that I'd rather be coding instead of frustrated by messed up drywall. I'll call an expert. Or at least a practiced layman.