I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things • Hacker News Board

Re: I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things

#101

Post by hermitdev » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:06 PM UTC

klez wrote: post #56

braythwayt wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as someone who writes blog posts littered with irrelevant pictures (but never on Medium!), I acknowledge your experience trying to solve a problem based on a blog post. Manpages and documentation are written to be references. Blog posts are written to be tutorials. They have different affordances, and as a result it is very hard to learn how to use something purely from a reference, and very different to sol…

There's one particular case where a look at a reference is warranted: when something doesn't behave as expected. For example, the other day someone asked on stackoverflow why a particular Java class to calculate a difference between two dates was returning a weird result when they asked for the difference in days. Turns out, the class would calculate the difference in years AND months AND days, so if you asked for th…

I haven't worked with Java much, but have done enough to have a thorough dislike of its built-in date libs. Trying to parse dates, for example, "2019-01-40" is accepted, and actually returns February 9, 2019. I'm not aware of Any other date lib that would accept this. The behavior was certainly surprising to me. Only found out because my QA guy at the time tried it, was also surprised by the result and filed a bug against one of my releases of a web service. Closed it out as won't fix.

Re: I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things

#102

Post by andreareina » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:08 PM UTC

lazerwalker wrote: post #37

jim-jim-jim wrote: post #28

One of the things I don't like about webdev (among many) is that I even have to Google in the first place. Manpages are so much more immediate and accessible. I also think that anything js-adjacent has a real culture problem. Trying to dredge an answer out of a Medium tutorial written in a cloying tone and interspersed with pointless gifs can be such a groan enducing experience. I'm hoping that the community will mat…

Do you personally have recs for how to parse manpages? In my experience, I've found them far more difficult to grok than e.g. the MDN JavaScript docs. Particularly if I'm trying to look up a tool that I don't already have familiarity with, as opposed to e.g. just trying to look up the correct syntax for a flag.

Except for being an online resource, the MDN docs are much more like man pages than what the parent is talking about.

Btw if you find the MDN search unsatisfactory (as I do) try mdn.io/search term. It's just a proxy for site:developer.mozilla.org search term + I'm Feeling Lucky.

Edit: https://github.com/lazd/mdn.io

Re: I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things

#103

Post by NegativeK » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:11 PM UTC

BossingAround wrote: post #33

xwdv wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every Google search you do is a lost opportunity for an unexpected conversation. Imagine never meeting a wife because you did a Google search instead.

Also imagine meeting your wife because you did a search query. Since we're in a purely hypothetical plane, both of these are equally plausible.

That doesn't make any intuitive sense.

Meeting people starts with conversations.

Re: I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things

#104

Post by o-__-o » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:18 PM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #70

travisoneill1 wrote: post #18

Google is not a search engine. It is a memory upgrade, and anybody who tries to write software with a standard human memory is obsolete.

Many times I've asked google a specific question and only got results in the form of "Top 10 vaguely related unhelpful bullshit" clickbait. So yeah, actually, it is a lot like a really big version of my own nigh-useless human memory.

The other times you get stack overflow or github repos with licenses that are typically not friendly to your project

For example, how many code bases have things ripped straight from StackOverflow in their code? Are any of them attributing the author based on CC-sharealike license? Nope.

How many snippets from GPL code has been used because it was found in GitHub?

So asking google is great, but it could very well taint your code. The next question is if this ticking time bomb will explode now or later

Re: I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things

#105

Post by LoSboccacc » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:18 PM UTC

this is only a partial aspect of the issue.

it's true that in the current "move fast break everything" climate developer knowledge expires at an alarming rate and everything needs to be rechecked constantly trough internet sources to fix integration issues between ever changing libraries

it's also true that searching sources without a solid knowledge base derived from theory and practice quickly devolves into cargo-cult programming.

I too sometimes feel like my skill differential often comes only from being very fast at googling stuff, however this is a gross oversimplification on what happens after the specific knowledge piece is acquired: whether the solution is taken to solve the problem at hand or if it results in a change in one own understanding of the problem domain makes all the difference.

Re: I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things

#106

Post by musgrove » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:18 PM UTC

You, and 10,000,000 other people out there.

Re: I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things

#107

Post by CondensedBrain » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:20 PM UTC

jim-jim-jim wrote: post #28

One of the things I don't like about webdev (among many) is that I even have to Google in the first place. Manpages are so much more immediate and accessible. I also think that anything js-adjacent has a real culture problem. Trying to dredge an answer out of a Medium tutorial written in a cloying tone and interspersed with pointless gifs can be such a groan enducing experience. I'm hoping that the community will mat…

https://devdocs.io/ isn't exactly equivalent to manpages, but works well enough. You can even download documentation for offline use.

Re: I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things

#108

Post by o-__-o » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:20 PM UTC

karmakaze wrote: post #74

My twist on this is: I am a good back-end developer, I'm good at Googling things. The things I tend to be Googling are typically either superficial, like syntax, or specific as in I know exactly what I want, how do I construct it in x language or y framework? It's quite rare that I have a problem and don't know how to approach it and they're the most fun. Sadly, it's also rare to need to look for algorithms. Just avo…

What do you do about license tainting in your code base? Stack overflow provides all of its answers under a Creative Commons license. An example may have been lifted from a GPL source, do you care that you have contributed this to your community project or corporate employers code? If the answer is no, then why care if you google or not

Re: I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things

#109

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:27 PM UTC

braythwayt wrote: post #92

antisemiotic wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't change the fact that irrelevant pictures (like memes and cheap popcultural references) belong neither in references nor blogposts, they're just a waste of time and bandwidth. Tone is a different matter, tutorials sure can be more lighthearted. But I'd still take a dry tutorial instead of forced, stillborn humor any day. (I'm not sure if the latter kind is all that common in the wild, could be an illusion…

As an author, that’s my decision to make about my blog posts. My choice of pictures belong in my blog posts, much as my choice of chords belong in my musical compositions. It’s a perfectly valid choice to write essays that are hyper-focused on just teaching the facts as efficiently as possible, but that isn’t some kind of universal rule that must be applied to all essays. I personally don’t care for the popular “Amer…

[deleted]

Re: I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things

#110

Post by karmakaze » Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 5:35 PM UTC

o-__-o wrote: post #108

karmakaze wrote: post #74

My twist on this is: I am a good back-end developer, I'm good at Googling things. The things I tend to be Googling are typically either superficial, like syntax, or specific as in I know exactly what I want, how do I construct it in x language or y framework? It's quite rare that I have a problem and don't know how to approach it and they're the most fun. Sadly, it's also rare to need to look for algorithms. Just avo…

What do you do about license tainting in your code base? Stack overflow provides all of its answers under a Creative Commons license. An example may have been lifted from a GPL source, do you care that you have contributed this to your community project or corporate employers code? If the answer is no, then why care if you google or not

I'm not sure you can licence how to do x in language or y with framework in a license as the code is not being copy/pasted but rather used as documentation on how to do things.