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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

#191

Post by jnbiche »

School-Cotton wrote: post #181
snazz wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed. Even in Linux, complete documentation for userland tools is usually a given.

Not so with webdev. That said, the source code is there for all of us to read. I'm a frontend developer and spend more time looking at source code when I need to figure out an issue than digging through Medium posts. Particularly when something is behaving in an unexpected manner.

I'd urge everyone who hates webdev to try this approach the next time they struggle with an issue. JavaScript, for all its sins, is fairly easy to read. And once you've understood the ~30 most common gotchas in JS, reading the source is highly beneficial (and here's a good intro to those gotchas, including an accompanying video: https://github.com/denysdovhan/wtfjs)

Or better yet, work in one of the statically-typed compile-to-JS languages such as Typescript, ReasonML, Elm, ScalaJS, or Purescript and worry about those gotchas much less (and only when wrapping external libraries).

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

#192

Post by verisimilitudes »

There's nothing wrong with referencing documentation, but I do see it reasonable to look down on those who can't program without asking a malicious corporation questions. So, I pride myself on not needing to do this, I suppose.

Of course, I also pride myself on using good tools. My observation of Stack Overflow is that it's an excellent resource if you don't know what you're doing and don't want to learn what you're doing. Unfortunately, that's the only real way to operate some things. The only times I ever really need to use the Internet for such a problem is when it involves some baroque WWW nonsense some idiot caused however many years ago that's still echoing today or it involves some baroque UNIX nonsense some idiot caused however many years ago that's still echoing today.

If you use good languages and good tools, with real standards, (Common Lisp is an example.) you'll find yourself seemingly magically free from all of this stupid and pointless drudgery. Consider giving it a try some time. Imagine not needing to rewrite code constantly because something updated or some external ''API'' changed or other nonsense.

As a closing aside, it's laughable that people are pointing to man pages as examples of good documentation. GNU Info isn't perfect, but it's leagues better than man pages will ever be, if only because it's segmented and hypertextual.

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

#193

Post by james_s_tayler »

genidoi wrote: post #169
ricardobeat wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Software is not so complicated What kind of software do you write? Software is one of the most unnecessary complex things humanity has invented.

I don't care how many years you've been programming, nobody git pulls a 10,000 class java codebase without nervously gulping.

I do.

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

#194

Post by hallman76 »

Acen wrote: post #190
thatoneuser wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 circumst…

You're trying to take off while still building the plane. So is AWS.

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

#196

Post by Theodores »

jimmaswell wrote: post #184
Theodores wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you are on the bleeding edge of the new shiny then you won't have this problem that I am seeing. But the guy supporting your code in five years time might.

To some extent the problem depends on how new and shiny your stuff is.

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

#197

Post by baroffoos »

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 find manpages to be mostly useless because they ignore the common case to explain every single possible function. For example I use the tar command 99% of the time for extracting files and 1% of the time compressing files. When I open the manual I want to be able to quickly work out how to extract a file but the first bit of non intro text on the man page is

>Options to GNU tar can be given in three different styles. In traditional style, the first argument is a cluster of option letters and all subsequent arguments supply arguments to those options that require them. The arguments are read in the same order as the option letters. Any command line words that remain after all options has been processed are treated as non-optional arguments: file or archive member names. For example, the c option requires creating the archive, the v option requests the verbose operation, and the f option takes an argument that sets the name of the archive to operate upon. The following command, written in the traditional style, instructs tar to store all files from the directory /etc into the archive file etc.tar verbosely listing the files being archived:

Scanning through the manpage a fair way down and I can't see the one bit info that covers almost all of my use cases for tar.

And for anything more complex than a tiny cli tool the manpage is far too large to use usefully.

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

#198

Post by ajkjk »

kumarvvr wrote: post #32

The problem is there is too much noise in Google. Its highly unlikely you can google your way to being a competent software designer I think relying on Google, at least in the initial days of development is bad. I rather developers struggle their way through relevant documentation than google.

I agree, and often wish there was a central repository of collected tribal knowledge not about how to do things but about to do them right. Google's resources for developers provide a bit if this, but not nearly enough.

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

#199

Post by detaro »

baroffoos wrote: post #197
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 find manpages to be mostly useless because they ignore the common case to explain every single possible function. For example I use the tar command 99% of the time for extracting files and 1% of the time compressing files. When I open the manual I want to be able to quickly work out how to extract a file but the first bit of non intro text on the man page is >Options to GNU tar can be given in three different style…

For the specific example of tar, the EXAMPLES section of the man page covers what I typically need, but that's not true for all man pages.

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

#200

Post by your-nanny »

baroffoos wrote: post #197
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 find manpages to be mostly useless because they ignore the common case to explain every single possible function. For example I use the tar command 99% of the time for extracting files and 1% of the time compressing files. When I open the manual I want to be able to quickly work out how to extract a file but the first bit of non intro text on the man page is >Options to GNU tar can be given in three different style…

one of the very first thing in tar's man page is an example of how to extract a file: https://linux.die.net/man/1/tar

but what evs. sometimes the man page is the thing, sometimes not.

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