Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer • Hacker News Board

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

#331

Post by efreak » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 6:08 AM UTC

meow1032 wrote: post #156

OJFord wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is used to really confuse me too, but now I can't remember why, because everything's the same: touch $EDITOR mv cp scp mount The place you're putting something is last in each case; we can even include everything that doesn't modify its location. All I can think of that breaks the rule is `rm`, `unlink`, and `umount`. But they're hardly gotchas, and they're not reversing arguments they just don't have a 'destina…

I think "zip" breaks this rule.

That's because with zip (and tar, and other archivers) you can have multiple items to move to a destination archive.

You can also do that with cp and mv if you need to, using `-t`. `cp -t .dotfiles/ .nanorc .bash*`. Generally more useful when you want to move a bunch of files around.

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

#332

Post by visarga » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 6:09 AM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #97

This is a fun exercise, then ask the second question "How productive can I be in my job when the network is unavailable?" The author states : What I’m trying to show with all this is that you can do something 100 times but still not remember how to do it off the top of your head. My experience differs from this, if I were to rewrite it I would say something like: "You can do something 100 times, and as long as you ca…

> "You can do something 100 times, and as long as you can look it up somewhere, it is okay to not memorize how to do it."

We used to memorise information, now we memorise meta-information - a mental map of concepts and trigger keywords. We have learned to quickly grok new concepts and we still have to understand how things work in order to do anything.

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

#333

Post by efreak » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 6:15 AM UTC

shiftpgdn wrote: post #126

cos2pi wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the same way with scp, I never remember the order and then it changes if you're uploading or downloading. Also, an obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1168/

Easy way to remember extracting with tar is "eXtract Zee Files" -xzf.

I no longer have issues with tar since I found out that most systems I use don't need the compression format anymore, and are happy to figure it out themselves. Not sure if it works with compressing or not (I generally use 7z or zip), but you can just `tar -x[v]f` on anything, regardless of file extension, and tar will extract anything it supports.

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

#334

Post by vasco » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 6:20 AM UTC

abalone wrote: post #316

vasco wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Load it all into Elasticsearch and just do an API call.

Network latency is an issue then. The word list is going to lag behind keystrokes. Also, doesn't work offline.

If you assume your corpus fits in the same instance (since you mention offline), you can run a single node elasticsearch on the same instance as well.

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

#335

Post by uhhyeahdude » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 6:23 AM UTC

asdffdsa wrote: post #25

mlaretallack wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. Its one of those things that after almost 20 years, I should remember. But it just does not go in. It becomes interesting when junior programmers are watching how I do something and I end up googl'ing things that they know. I use the excuse that it fees up more space for other more interesting stuff, a bit like some execs just ware T-shirt and jeans to reduce the number of things to distract them in the mo…

"it fees up more space for other more interesting stuff" I see you take a similar approach to spelling

Your punctuation choices are also executive level.

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

#336

Post by Wump » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 6:28 AM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #97

This is a fun exercise, then ask the second question "How productive can I be in my job when the network is unavailable?" The author states : What I’m trying to show with all this is that you can do something 100 times but still not remember how to do it off the top of your head. My experience differs from this, if I were to rewrite it I would say something like: "You can do something 100 times, and as long as you ca…

Flow is key. At the same time, I agree on not having to (or trying to) memorize everything.

I've been exploring building a tool which is sort of a "universal search bar" for programming questions: finding answers via google, searching local repos, finding code snippets you've saved, etc. Another way to think of it is like an extension of your memory.

The idea is to make the information super fast to retrieve so you break don't break flow while you're programming.

For anyone who's curious, I'm collecting interest here: https://forms.gle/8q9nPUc22t6WDFsG7

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

#337

Post by james_s_tayler » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 6:36 AM UTC

nhebb wrote: post #273

weavie wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just younger devs, I've been a professional coder for 24 years now and I still have imposter syndrome.

I saw Scott Hanselman speak, and he said he has impostor syndrome. I thought to myself, great, if Hanselman has impostor syndrome, I'm not even qualified. I must be an impostor-syndrome impostor.

Maybe that's Hanselman's ploy. Run mind games on you to make your imposter syndrome worse. Muahahaha.

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

#338

Post by james_s_tayler » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 6:44 AM UTC

abalone wrote: post #308

lliamander wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> A work sample test, structured interview, or IQ test (alone or in combination) would be a much better filtering process. I'm not sure what any of these mean in concrete terms. Is an IQ test like those "why are manhole covers round" Microsoft questions of yore? Yuck. Is a work sample a homework test? That takes more time for both parties. It's not a good substitute for a 1 hour first round screen. And what's a "stru…

You should probably look up what an IQ test involves instead of just guessingly blindly, getting it wrong and then writing off the suggestion based on a wrong assumption.

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

#339

Post by taesko » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 6:47 AM UTC

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.

I remember it by first remembering that it is possible to not provide the destination (ln /.../file) to create a symlink with exactly the same name in the current directory. So it has only 1 required argument which always has to be first.

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

#340

Post by peruvian » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 7:14 AM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #97

This is a fun exercise, then ask the second question "How productive can I be in my job when the network is unavailable?" The author states : What I’m trying to show with all this is that you can do something 100 times but still not remember how to do it off the top of your head. My experience differs from this, if I were to rewrite it I would say something like: "You can do something 100 times, and as long as you ca…

Personally if the internet is down my employer wouldn’t expect me to get any work done, so it doesn’t matter. Would be different if I was self employed though.