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Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

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Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

#251

Post by moxious »

jteppinette wrote: post #248

I use dash to keep all of the reference material for libraries and programming languages I use stored locally. It has cut my searches down to almost nothing. IMO, it is better to use the reference material, because it forces you to understand the mechanisms involved and solve the problem yourself vs looking up a solution. This act helps imprint the knowledge into your long term memory. Of course, this is my anecdotal…

Why would you want to imprint this stuff into your long term memory? Google is an extra brain with effectively infinite free space, why would I want to use mine?

Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

#252

Post by lliamander »

xvector wrote: post #179
blackflame7000 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally understand your philosophy and you make some great suggestions, but overall there's one big flaw with whiteboard interviews: Artificial Pressure and its impact on people's ability to think clearly on the spot. I am a very methodical thinker which is why I tend to prefer work in large scale ore high-performance systems where you consider the implications of thread contention and so forth. I've designed and b…

Whiteboard interviews exist because without them companies wouldn't have a metric to artificially restrict hiring. Passing a whiteboard interview makes both the company and interviewee feel special and maintains the bubble of software engineering salaries.

Companies don't care about artificially restricting hiring: they want developers to be as cheap as possible.

The truth is, software engineering really quite hard, but that whiteboard interviews just happen to be a rather poor way of evaluating candidates.

A work sample test, structured interview, or IQ test (alone or in combination) would be a much better filtering process.

Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

#253

Post by Izkata »

rohit2412 wrote: post #166
unoti wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how to create a symbolic link under Linux. I just can't figure out a way to remember what comes first Remember it like this: It's the same syntax as "cp". To copy a file you use "cp source dest". It's the same for ln: "ln -s source dest"

I always think of links as pointing from source to destination. Your way would break that intuition for me. It would be the source of the address and the destination for the address to be copied to.

Try taking the command a step back with hardlinks: ln source dest

The association with cp makes a lot more sense then. This is how I learned it.

Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

#254

Post by thefifthsetpin »

soulofmischief wrote: post #88
limograf wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ul = countable items in arbitrary order ol = countable items in a pertinent sequence dl = key value pairs table = a matrix of three or more keys and values

More mnemonically, ul = Unordered List ol = Ordered List dl = Definition List Definition List is the only description not immediately obvious, but understanding a definition as a key/value pair clears things up and isn't hard to remember.

Evidently the w3c agreed with you, as in html5 made dl a backronym for "Description List"

Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

#255

Post by skzo »

TACIXAT wrote: post #103
throwaway744678 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha! My trick is to ln -s a b then look at the link with ls -l, then remove my garbage! Your way is much better.

I just do it the one way, get the error that the destination already exists, then swap them.

Me too, I was starting to think I was the crazy one after reading the other comments :)

Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

#256

Post by zrobotics »

wil421 wrote: post #197
setr wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm of the opinion that not googling stuff means you're not a proper engineer. And from what I've seen, those who don't google consistently also fail to understand the answers they find when they do google things. It is, in fact, an essential skill.

I’ve asked pre-internet programmers and they said they used to keep reference books at their desk or even a small library/book room at their employers. I’ve heard some government contractors can’t google because they work on non-internet connected computers. They probably keep a lot of books.

Reminds me of the days of paper datasheets for electronics. God am I glad I missed out on that.

Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

#257

Post by jdnenej »

inimino wrote: post #213
abalone wrote: post #75

This is great but the premise seems kind of straw man. I don’t know a single developer that thinks “googling stuff means you’re not a proper engineer.” Perhaps this is a reference to the interviewing process. Tests are a different thing, though. I’ve been on practical technical screens where you can google, because the test was about building a larger system, and they don’t care if you don’t remember this or that API…

Googling too much is an indicator that your environment or process isn't working well. It's not a point of pride if half your job requires looking up how to use tools you don't understand. The problem is that people naturally blame themselves for not knowing everything rather than accepting that we have built monuments of trash code that nobody should be expected to understand and that therefore we should stop doing…

I don't typically have to google much but I recently attempted to update webpack/babel at work and I must have made over 100 searches of error messages in build tool packages I didn't even know existed.

Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

#258

Post by pankajdoharey »

abalone wrote: post #75

This is great but the premise seems kind of straw man. I don’t know a single developer that thinks “googling stuff means you’re not a proper engineer.” Perhaps this is a reference to the interviewing process. Tests are a different thing, though. I’ve been on practical technical screens where you can google, because the test was about building a larger system, and they don’t care if you don’t remember this or that API…

Well searching such basic stuff may mean you are not.

Re: Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

#260

Post by vehementi »

reginaldo wrote: post #12
aloknnikhil wrote: post #7

On the list of things I always Google, is how to create a symbolic link under Linux. I just can't figure out a way to remember what comes first; the source or the destination. The man pages add to the confusion by calling the "source" the target. So, the rule of thumb I now follow is cp or mv semantics.

Here's how I finally memorized it: ln has a 1-file-argument invocation, so ln -s ../../a_fine_file will create a symbolic link to that file under the current directory and under the "a_fine_file" file name. The single argument case has to have the file you want to link to as input. That generalizes nicely as the 2-file-argument invocation maintaining the logic.

Sounds like you're making bold assumptions about people's beliefs about whether the extra argument would go before or after the existing argument :)
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