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

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

#121

Post by jstarfish »

zrobotics wrote: post #64
klez wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, people don't even think that's an option. It's like you either know how to do things or you ask an actual person. To be fair, in some cases it's just laziness.

How is googling something not the lazy option though? Personally, I think it's far more work to ask someone and wait for the answer over immediately getting the answer from searching and finding a 4 year old forum post with the same question.

Asking someone skips the tedious work of filtering applicable solutions from 20+ years of forum posts, memes and SEO shitfarms in exchange for an actual-but-delayed answer.

As I get older I have less time or patience for it myself. The effort required increases with the amount of content available on the internet. Some people just aren't good at research in the first place.

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

#122

Post by danielmg »

NegativeK wrote: post #103
BossingAround wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not the way I do it.

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

#123

Post by DonHopkins »

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…

I hope you're not advocating writing documentation in troff instead of html!

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

#124

Post by MarkMc »

awinder wrote: post #38
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…

I’d honestly love to know what people are comparing to javascript when they complain about rate of change / having to learn, unless it’s just a mental bias on learning something new vs something they’re comfortable with. I’m in a new position working on python and spring APIs and it’s effectively the same deal — researching means filtering through bitrotted methods and advice over a 4-5 year period, new methods & lib…

I've been programming mostly in Java for 20 years, and in the past whenever I picked up web development it always felt like a kludge. JavaScript was inferior to Java, CSS was frustratingly difficulty to lay out components, and HTML forced me to treat my application like a printable document. Tools and libraries weren't as efficient or robust. Then I had to test on 5 different OS/browser combinations and implement ugly workarounds to fix the inevitable discrepancies between platforms.

Recently I've been developing in Flutter/Dart, and it's so enjoyable. The Dart language is an improvement on Java, the Flutter documentation and online support is great, apps look and behave the same on different devices, the API and underlying code is well designed. Plus the tooling and IDE integration is first-class.

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

#125

Post by onefuncman »

hermitdev wrote: post #101
klez wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ag…

this complaint is almost as old as the Java language. you should use Jodatime if you can't upgrade to Java 8+ yet -- see https://www.joda.org/joda-time/

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

#126

Post by jhoh »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #120
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…

> I'm hoping that the community will mature alongside its technology. Which technology? Web development frameworks seem to have a half-life of about 12 months. 'Mature' and 'obsolete' are near synonymous.

> Web development frameworks seem to have a half-life of about 12 months.

Initial realeases of the most popular JS-frameworks:

Angular – 2010

React – 2013

Vue – 2014

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

#127

Post by espeed »

"The power of the unaided mind is greatly exaggerated. It is 'things' that make us smart, the cognitive artifacts that allow human beings to overcome the limitations of human memory and conscious reasoning." - Donald A. Norman, Things That Make Us Smart

https://jnd.org/things_that_make_us_smart_forbes_article/

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

#128

Post by saurik »

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…

This seems orthogonal to the complaint: the person you are responding to is assuming you aren't just doing this because you think it is a worthy art form for your audience of people who enjoy it, but that you are attempting to write something that provides strong value to the reader. You are welcome to write whatever you want, but you are fooling yourself if you think it is helping. If you want a music analogy, you are welcome to make a movie score that has loud and clear lyrics while actors are talking... but I would still say to you that lyrics "have no place" in a movie score during a dialog scene--the audience is trying (and now failing) to hear the dialogue--even if there are some people who seem to enjoy that. So: you are welcome to write those tutorials in that style if you personally must--no one is saying they should be banned and censored and deleted from the web--and also you really should know that you are actively making a decision to be less useful.

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

#129

Post by hiccuphippo »

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…

It would be very nice if the whole MDN could be downloaded as man pages or even just html pages with some form of local search.

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

#130

Post by antisemiotic »

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…

>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.

Of course, just like anyone's free to say "it's a generic 4:4 I–V–vi–IV pop song, nothing to write home about" or "it's yet another ISO standard blogpost, don't bother clicking through the popup". Though I think a better equivalent of a meme-laden blogpost would be a sea-shanty with changing time signatures and atonal riffs with a rabid scene kid at the vocals - kind of bizzare, kind of crass, fully useless for pulling a rope on a galleon.

>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 wasn't arguing that every blogpost should be hyper-focused, just that it would be kind of nice if more people took the route of "uncreative but solid" rather than "trying to create an illusion of creativity with randomness".

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