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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

#181

Post by School-Cotton »

snazz wrote: post #36
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…

Man pages rarely are enough in my experience. When I encounter an issue with grub-install not writing to my EFI system partition, good luck finding much about it in its very short man page. You’ll have better luck using the ArchWiki, which is like a much better man page, but a simple Google search (or another search engine) will show a forum post with an easy solution as the very first result. Piping six man pages th…

Yet another reason to prefer the BSD family of OSes over the GNU/Linux family.

In the BSDs, self-contained, complete, and correct documentation is a cultural value. Not one that’s always achieved, but a value nonetheless. Information missing from the man pages is a reportable bug.

And if the man page doesn’t document something, its code is right there in /usr/src for you to dig into.

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

#182

Post by School-Cotton »

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…

In general it seems like most native C++ software has far fewer external dependencies than JS software does. Not zero, of course, but culturally people are much more reticent to take a third-party dependency than they are with JS.

Perhaps this is because it is just so much less of a hassle to do so in a world with things like NPM.

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

#183

Post by School-Cotton »

Theodores wrote: post #180
School-Cotton wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the issue is not really whether I access the docs through `man` or through the browser. It’s comprehensive, accurate docs provided in one place by the vendor of the tool I’m using, versus wading through a crowdsourced resource like SO which might be incomplete, out of date, or inaccurate. If a library vendor provides good docs on their website, that’s just as good as man pages, but in my experience they usuall…

Stack Overflow has a problem of outdated answers written ten years ago by people wanting to collect experience points. Technology moves on and those early answers are simply no good. Recently I decided to learn a few things from first principles - reading the specs. If I then try to put a half decent answer on SO then it will be answer 97, 3563 upvotes behind the 'right answer'. New person who comes along isn't going…

I completely agree that this is a serious problem. But I’m not sure how it could be solved, and I still think vendors providing docs, and easily readable source code for when the docs fail, is a necessary complement to any crowd-sourced model, be it forums, SO, or anything you might imagine replacing SO with.

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

#184

Post by jimmaswell »

Theodores wrote: post #180
School-Cotton wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the issue is not really whether I access the docs through `man` or through the browser. It’s comprehensive, accurate docs provided in one place by the vendor of the tool I’m using, versus wading through a crowdsourced resource like SO which might be incomplete, out of date, or inaccurate. If a library vendor provides good docs on their website, that’s just as good as man pages, but in my experience they usuall…

Stack Overflow has a problem of outdated answers written ten years ago by people wanting to collect experience points. Technology moves on and those early answers are simply no good. Recently I decided to learn a few things from first principles - reading the specs. If I then try to put a half decent answer on SO then it will be answer 97, 3563 upvotes behind the 'right answer'. New person who comes along isn't going…

This is basically never been the case for me. Once or twice I got an answer that suggested a deprecated API call, which I could then just google the replacement for and use that. I don't have any complaint about StackOverflow personally.

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

#185

Post by FooHentai »

amanzi wrote: post #173

This is not just for webdev roles. We used to joke about this in my sysadmin days - when hiring new staff, the only test should be how effectively they could Google for a particular solution. And in all seriousness, understanding how Google works and how to use the search operators effectively, is a crucial skill in an IT career. Edit: relevant XKCD - https://xkcd.com/979/ (and the only thing worse than that comic, i…

Rate of change is the biggest driver for this, at least for me. It's rare that I'm covering the same territory twice, so it's novel research all the time.

That said, the search output wouldn't be of any use without being able to relate it to past experience and accepted practices.

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

#186

Post by megaremote »

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.

> But I've never met a single person who has ever directly read it.

I love how this is a unit of measure now. "I have never met anyone with an iphone, so...".

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

#187

Post by miguelmota »

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.

I agree; human memory is good at keeping indexes, which is augmented by the internet to retrieve the full content. You only need to store enough in your mind to know what to Google for. Memorization as a skill is less valuable now than it used to be.

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

#188

Post by flukus »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #77
lazerwalker wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, manpages feel like the equivalent of being served a book on a subject where I just want to know a quick incantation. Like reading the entire wikipedia entry on cats just to settle a dispute on how many toes they have (18 btw). I think manpages are a popular thing to worship here for nerd points but people don't use them nearly as much as they say they do because nobody actually wants to read a manual when they…

> Yeah, manpages feel like the equivalent of being served a book on a subject where I just want to know a quick incantation.

Because manpages are from a time when reading the manual was expected behavior, searching for a quick incantation more often than not results in learned helplessness because you don't actually learn anything, just the specific spell for the specific situation.

I'm as guilty as anyone of trying to solve the immediate problem with a magic spell at times, but bropages embrace this willful ignorance.

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

#189

Post by sys_64738 »

I found for web development that to google is simply the fastest way to a solution I'm trying to solve immediately. It is all about rushing to fix the next problem in code. Need to do something new? You can enter a few keywords and the solution pops up. For most folks this search then copy/paste is the extent of programming nowadays. The deeper stuff where we all get enjoyment from programming done without google may be a thing of the past.

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

#190

Post by Acen »

thatoneuser wrote: post #179
Pxtl wrote: post #157

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 fe…

A great example of this is AWS. I'm not a power user but I dabble. You have to go back and forth through user docs that all have some % of the correct steps, but no single doc has all of the correct steps. Some reference deprecated api, some just never seemed to work in the first place and you wonder how it even got there. I get that these ecosystems evolve over time but I'm not convinced that that evolution requires…

I connect with this at a spiritual level right now.

We're building some new infrastructure for a service that is also new, using terraform. Which only our devops have used before.

It's an interesting time.

AWS Cognito with app clients and not user pools + AWS API gateway, connecting to a system linked with dynamodb, Kinesis data stream and firehose.

Like each part stand alone is documented okay with specific circumstances. But nothing interlinking at anything past the basic level.

Trial and error is brutal.

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