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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

#211

Post by isubasinghe »

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…

Oh I can relate to this a lot as well, it is really hard to get some services on AWS working together. There is documentation but its always not enough. I find stackoverflow + trial and error the best way to resolve issues but it is quite a painful dev experience

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

#212

Post by tasuki »

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…

TLDR pages (https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr) are nice exactly for this use case.

There's also a web interface, for tar that'd be: https://tldr.ostera.io/tar

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

#213

Post by dirkt »

braythwayt wrote: post #43
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…

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…

What is nearly always missing is some sort of overview that explains you which parts are there, what are they good for, and how they work together.

Either these are very rare, or there are hard to google because they are drowned out by the many tutorials.

When you follow a tutorial, you are shown a very specific way of doing things (which often isn't up to date, with no indication that in the meantime this way has been replaced by another way).

And while that's very helpful for a beginner, it isn't as helpful for an experienced programmer, especially if he or she is having a problem that needs a slightly different way of doing things, and the missing information is just "instead of X, you can also do Y here".

And references don't answer these questions, unless you work through them from top to bottom (which usually takes more time than you have).

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

#214

Post by thinkingemote »

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…

Hah! Worse is over a day you open a dozen or so pages about a topic lets say SES and scan through them then later youre back to looking for some thing which you know exists on one of the pages and now you have to trawl over everything again trying to find it seemingly at random.

It's like you need to keep an index of things in your head when reading AWS docs as you know the information is dispersed across multiple different places.

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

#215

Post by julius_set »

There’s a lot of people commenting and supporting the author of the article and in his practice of googling and how normalized that is.

This leads me to a hypothesis. I would argue a large percentage of software developers are average, the bell curve for extremely brilliant engineers and extremely idiotic engineers must be be low for each end.

So what is considered average work?

I would working on mundane issues which involves a lot of googling. It would also reason that if you are googling a lot you aren’t doing anything that’s breakthrough or exciting since if the rate of your googling is high that would indicate that the problem you are solving is quite common.

There is a large difference between building things with React and learning how React works and trying to create your own.

I’m not sure why the “re-inventing the wheel” I dread the day we stop innovating and resign our career lives to “well someone else solved this problem so it must be the best solution - no need for me to innovate.”

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

#216

Post by animal531 »

scarlac wrote: post #117
HillaryBriss wrote: post #88

Has anyone faced an interview question like: "Ok, we have to invert this binary tree. Now what would you google to solve this?"

I have indeed asked this question to several candidates, yes. They were faced with a debugging challenge and some of them weren't sure what .repeat() (JavaScript) did/what the argument meant. I literally said "What would google for?" and then proceeded to invite them to show me in a browser. It gave us a good impression of how good they are at finding answers to coding problems.

You might just be my new hero. I find it both sad (but also interesting) how little the current IT interview process actually has to do with what job candidates will do once they get the job, and predicting their performance.

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

#217

Post by [deleted] »

karmakaze wrote: post #74

My twist on this is: I am a good back-end developer, I'm good at Googling things. The things I tend to be Googling are typically either superficial, like syntax, or specific as in I know exactly what I want, how do I construct it in x language or y framework? It's quite rare that I have a problem and don't know how to approach it and they're the most fun. Sadly, it's also rare to need to look for algorithms. Just avo…

[deleted]

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

#219

Post by jimmaswell »

Theodores wrote: post #196
jimmaswell wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My experience has been the same ranging from questions about C, C#, JS, Python, and many others.

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

#220

Post by c0vfefe »

xwdv wrote: post #21
kawsper wrote: post #9

Using search engines sometimes feel like a lost art if you spend any time in Facebook groups, where people will ask mundande, simple, and easily Googleable questions. Sometimes I wonder if people do it to fill some sort of social need, and don't particularly care for the answer.

Every Google search you do is a lost opportunity for an unexpected conversation. Imagine never meeting a wife because you did a Google search instead.

Imagine never meeting a wife because you used a self-checkout, pumped your own gas, drove a car instead of taking an Uber, read a FAQ instead of calling customer support, watched TV instead attending local theater, played Minesweeper instead of Fortnite, or commented on Hacker News instead of going speed-dating.
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