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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

#201

Post by your-nanny »

flukus wrote: post #188
hombre_fatal wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

not to make fun of my old roommate, but I had to give him line by line instructions for him to use a scientific calculator, which he dutifully copied, instead of taking the time to learn calculator principles. know your tools.

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

#202

Post by your-nanny »

o-__-o wrote: post #104
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tai…

I make SO attributions when applicable.

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

#203

Post by diminoten »

baron816 wrote: post #112

This has not been my experience. I never take notes, almost never go to StackOverflow, and can find anything I don't know from MDN and W3 docs. Maybe it's because the things I work on are really simple, but I like to think it's because I've developed a deep enough understanding of JS/React/Redux and design my code in such a way that I'm easily able to reason through any task and resolve any bug.

I'm sorry but I literally don't believe you, especially if you're working in a space as quickly-evolving as frontend development...

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

#204

Post by baroffoos »

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…

Stack overflow doesn't need to be replaced they just need to find a way of filtering out answers that are no good anymore which is actually a bit of a hard task because many ancient answers about vim and git are still perfectly valid.

Maybe some kind of super downvote for outdated questions that is strictly moderated so it isn't abused.

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

#205

Post by baroffoos »

bengale wrote: post #53

Experience is knowing what to search for.

Also knowing when you have found the answer. An experienced developer doesn't just paste the first thing they find. They read it and think "Ah yes, this will do what I need"

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

#206

Post by InafuSabi »

Love this article. THe programmer is honest and teaches us, some handy things. The ability to work well with a good search-engine is vital, esp when you need to spew out good code.

Re-inventing the wheel is out.

Standing on the shoulders of giants is in, just like Isaac Newton did it centuries ago

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

#207

Post by baroffoos »

detaro wrote: post #199
baroffoos wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For some reason my copy of the tar manpage on fedora has no examples section

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

#208

Post by trakout »

robertAngst wrote: post #135
baron816 wrote: post #112

This has not been my experience. I never take notes, almost never go to StackOverflow, and can find anything I don't know from MDN and W3 docs. Maybe it's because the things I work on are really simple, but I like to think it's because I've developed a deep enough understanding of JS/React/Redux and design my code in such a way that I'm easily able to reason through any task and resolve any bug.

> I'm easily able to reason through any task and resolve any bug. This is 80% of my code, but I only spend 20% of my time doing it. Its that obscure bug that really requires reading. I find if I am spending lots of time Googling/Stack Overflow, its for the quick lookup of parameters and a real world example.

This. Op has either been very, very lucky in his tenure -- or, he has never had to build a site with compatibility requirements targeting >= IE9, Blackberry's browser, or Safari iOS (which is basically mobile IE).

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

#209

Post by em-bee »

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…

but there is a dozen ways to compress files, and only one way to extract them (for each compression format). i need the tar manpage much more when i compress, and rarely when i decompress.

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

#210

Post by ddxxdd »

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 feel like Android and iPhone programming are exactly the same way. The official documentation is confusing and worthless to me.
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