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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

#151

Post by Pxtl »

jhoh wrote: post #126
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Angular doesn't count as 2010 because they did massive compatibility breaking change to Angular2 such that it was basically a new framework.

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

#152

Post by mgkimsal »

RussianCow wrote: post #145
tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the "manpage" does exist - it's the spec. But I've never met a single person who has ever directly read it.

MDN does a pretty good job of distilling the web spec into readable documentation: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/

it's so 'readable' that a friend of mine is... reading it. Out loud. In to Soundcloud. (well, JS stuff anyway).

https://soundcloud.com/user-956222694

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

#153

Post by kyriakos »

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…

the worst kind is youtube tutorials disguised as blog posts. you open the link, there's 5 lines of intro and then an embedded video.

and I hate videos cause usually skimming through text you can get to the part you want to read quickly but with videos you need to go through it

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

#154

Post by mgkimsal »

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…

wow - replace 'java' with 'mysql' and you've got one those decades-old go-to arguments against mysql. Except... the anti-mysql crowd would always point to it with the implication that somehow it was the only "wrong" behavior in the computing universe. I had no idea Java behaved that way too.

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

#155

Post by err4nt »

tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #142
markbnj wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 don't really get this response. First there's the notion that "webdev" is the discipline where information is so fractured that you need to go googling around to figure out how to do everything. All the other disciplines have a magic thing called a man page…

Also the "manpage" does exist - it's the spec. But I've never met a single person who has ever directly read it.

I'm in the HTML specs and CSS specs every day :D

- https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/

- https://drafts.csswg.org/

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

#156

Post by username90 »

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.

Most of the value you create is done by your subconscious and it can't just google things, so getting things into your head is still required and the more you have there the better.

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

#157

Post by Pxtl »

A big part of it is that imho technology has gotten more powerful, but still no easy to use. Like, I'm imagining in 20 years the API for Amazon's drone fleet will be here and we'll still be like "wait, the address parameter is for an IP address? And the library isn't thread-safe but also doesn't connection pool so I have to maintain one dronecloud client per thread? And what's this cryptic "rotor invert" error?

It feels like half my job is googling how to do common things in popular libraries and finding completely counter-intuitive pain-points.

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

#158

Post by deiznof »

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.

This really just isn't true about the javascript scene anymore, and hasn't been for a little while now. React and Angular alone make up the vast majority of framework usage and they've been out for years.

Honestly, a lot of javascript criticism I see nowadays is a little outdated.

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

#159

Post by LandR »

pteraspidomorph wrote: post #52
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…

For js and js-adjacent technologies or libraries, there sometimes aren't any references to speak of, unfortunately. You're supposed to divine the information you need from task-oriented texts and code snippets.

I'm a developer.

When I work with most stuff that isn't web dev, life is good. I can figure most stuff out painlessly. It's mostly feels like working on a space that has been designed and documented by someone sane.

When I'm forced to do Web dev type stuff... I want to jump off the roof. It always makes me question my life choices that led to me being exposed to js. I hate it, it's a logically incoherent disaster that feels like its been deigned by people who are all just winging it and sorely lacking a good CS degree. It all just feels immature and feels like it's a field trying to develop methadologies while ignoring lessons of the past and as a result making mistakes they shouldn't be.

Once you get into this npm / node nonsense it feels like proper wild west madness.

I'm sure it will mature some day. I'll probably be retired by then though. Then again maybe the entire eco system is doomed to a future of just constant nonsensical churn and the solution is just therapy or install nets on the tall buildings to catch devs, who after spending another day hating js, decide to junp off the roof!

Another problem is I don't see many Web developers wanting to learn when they encounter something they don't understand, instead they just want some code they can copy and paste that had the illusion of solving their problem. Understanding be damned. Or even better a library, and hey if it has a million dependencies... Well.. That's life right?

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

#160

Post by username90 »

markbnj wrote: post #111
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…

> 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 don't really get this response. First there's the notion that "webdev" is the discipline where information is so fractured that you need to go googling around to figure out how to do everything. All the other disciplines have a magic thing called a man page…

> All the other disciplines have a magic thing called a man page that just gives you the answers. This is obviously not true, right?

It is true to some extent. The less dependencies you have the less you need Google. Have thousands of dependencies in node? You will likely google their different error messages a lot. Write low level C libraries where not having dependencies is a key feature? Then Google wont help you much at all, the few times I try I almost never find anything useful for my work.

So the thing about web dev is that you automatically have all browsers as dependencies, not to mention all the libraries, frameworks and api's people are using in modern webdev workflows. Most other fields tend to have much simpler dependencies than that.

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