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I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things
- RandomBacon 7y agoA good <anything> can find answers and apply them to their specific situation.
- adamgamble 7y agoThis is one thing that I make sure to tell any new developer. Don’t be embarrassed to google things. Understanding how to figure out the best way to solve the problem is the objective, not showing everyone that you’ve got all your tools memorized perfectly. We have close to the summation of human knowledge at our fingertips. Why would we be embarrassed to harness that power?
- phalangion 7y agoI'm a college professor. I try to teach my students enough that they know what to Google, and that they can understand and use the result. I can't teach nearly everything they might need in the future, but I can give them the foundation.
- leetrout 7y agoMy reviews from students this semester included this little gem: “He aggressively encourages the use of search engines” Because every time they would ask me a question I would ask them if they tried to Google it first.
- fencepost 7y agoSounds like you need to introduce them to LMGTFY.
- klez 7y agoOf course. Even MDs, despite all their years of study don't have all the procedures and possible diagnoses in their heads all the time and need to read literature and consult with other physicians to reach conclusions. I'm not sure why people think software development (and computers in general) is somehow different. We don't know everything. We basically can't. What we (and all other professions) have is knowledge on how to apply new information to what we already know. So yes, you're right. You have to teach the basics, how to put them together and how to add new pieces once you inevitably hit something you don't know.
- k__ 7y agoI allergic to Amoxicillin and always get irritated looks when I tell this a doctor. They usually have to search for an alternative in books, because they don't know them from the top of their heads.
- sokoloff 7y agoI wonder if the irritated look isn't from "damn, the thing I know from experience works well won't work for this patient" rather than "damn, now I have to crack open a book".
- imjustsaying 7y agoThis is also partly why specialists exist. An infectious disease DO/MD would know both what the alternative would be and possibly even the appropriate dose calculation off the top of their head because antibiotic management is their bread and butter. If the physician you were at felt unable to make the right call, he could have referred you to or consulted with someone who could. An 'irritated look' might instead be a flurry of such treatment paths going through their mind. 'Can I figure this out on my own? Should I consult? Should I refer out? Should I just check UpToDate? What does the latest literature I read say to do? What was done for the last patient who had this? Has the literature changed since then? What is the hospital policy on this (if any?)? What did my microbiology class say to do for this? What do the boards think is right to do in this instance?'
- travisoneill1 7y agoDoctors don't seem to know that, though. I have never seen one google anything and I have caught their mistakes by checking myself.
- blub 7y agoConsulting with other specialists or reading specialist literature is in a wholly different class of information quality compared to using a search engine.
- alobat72 7y agoI always tell new developers ‚developing is a lot of reading and a little writing‘
- sbhn 7y agoI can solve any problem, in any language using google, which will probably forward me onto stackexchange or Github.
- tannhaeuser 7y agoWhich begs the question why we're not going straight to stackexchange. I'm doing the same btw, just using DDG instead.
- kawsper 7y agoUsing 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.
- willart4food 7y ago. . and if you tell them that you found the answer just by googling it, you're the a-hole.
- yohann305 7y agoBefore the age of the internet, when someone didn’t know something they would first ask their family or friends for the meaning and if nobody would know or weren’t really sure, they then would open the encyclopedia, or move on to the next thing. It feels more naturels to ask someone first than googling for it, maybe it’s the social aspect of humans, but it could also be laziness, but googling things is definitely a skill that can be improved upon
- sokoloff 7y agoIf you send them a lmgtfy.com link, you might be, though I've done that several times to close friends.
- klez 7y agoIn my experience, people don't even think that's an option. It's like you either know how to do things or you ask an actual person. To be fair, in some cases it's just laziness.
- zrobotics 7y agoHow is googling something not the lazy option though? Personally, I think it's far more work to ask someone and wait for the answer over immediately getting the answer from searching and finding a 4 year old forum post with the same question.
- themark 7y agoIf it weren't for google, I would be a great janitor.
- travisoneill1 7y agoGoogle is not a search engine. It is a memory upgrade, and anybody who tries to write software with a standard human memory is obsolete.
- maxxxxx 7y agoThat’s total nonsense. Having a good memory is still extremely valuable.
- nvrspyx 7y agoNo one said it’s not still valuable, but less so on it’s own with the advent of the internet and Google. The same thing can be said with taking notes in school: you’re less effective using human memory alone without the augment of note taking.
- maxxxxx 7y agoYes, you need both. I think it's even more important today with the massive amount of information that's available. And in addition you need the skill to look up stuff.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mrmonkeyman 7y agoHumans suck at both memory _and_ logic, which you demonstrated just now.
- xwdv 7y agoWrong. Software is not so complicated that you have to Google search everything every time. If you are not internalizing new knowledge, you are performing poorly.
- ricardobeat 7y ago
- thecrumb 7y ago“Never memorize something that you can look up.” ~ Albert Einstein
- james_s_tayler 7y agoOn the contrary, do. Having things in working memory is the core of creative problem solving.
- jim-jim-jim 7y agoOne 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 mature alongside its technology.
- BossingAround 7y agoWhat you're mentioning is all just a side effect of something being extremely accessible. Webdev is very easy to start and get into, but on the deep end, it's just as deep and difficult as coding a backend of your application in Java or Go. You don't have to search the internet for web dev any more than you have to do so for any other dev job.
- noir_lord 7y agoCouldn't agree more. All that and emojii's sprinkled everywhere like cat vomit.
- snazz 7y agoMan 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 through grep to find what I’m looking for is simply not as fast as Googling an error message. I think there’s also a sort of cultural difference between languages and tools frequented by newer and older programmers: more experienced people look for documentation and then get working on their project, whereas less experienced programmers look for tutorials and very specific “soft” documentation. Transitioning from modifying tutorials (the type-in-the-code-in-the-magazine of the 21st century) to glancing at the documentation is probably the surest sign of maturity. Still, you can get a ton done by copypasta. This might have to do with learning to code with or without the Internet, I’m not sure. I’m personally very envious of people who can take a look at the docs and just get chopping without the assistance of the GIF-covered Medium posts.
- kumarvvr 7y agoThe 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.
- ajkjk 7y agoI 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.
- sandwall 7y agoI think this statement is widely applicable ... "I'm not a good ____, I'm just good at googling things." You name it, it fits. Knowing when and how to ask for help is essential to everything and an important skill for everyone.
- doubleorseven 7y agoYes exactly. The future of schools will have to integrate "knowing how to find something quickly and efficiently" into it's core along side "doubt anything you find online".
- supakeen 7y agoI feel that over the years of doing things related to web development I actually have to Google less. Frameworks change, idioms change, but the web itself has largely remained stable (it's still HTTP, even if we now sometimes use HTTP/2). The same security concepts apply. I feel like I can authoratively answer on more subjects than I could 10 years ago. Maybe this is mostly related to front-end frameworks? We've only really had one big shakeup in the backend and that's that for the past decade or so we've all moved towards preferring async code (yay Python3k).
- Waterluvian 7y agoI think it's like a chemist needing to reference the periodic table less as they inherently memorize more of it. That's not the hard part of chemistry. Looking up call signatures, APIs and common patterns is not the hard part of software development.
- ehnto 7y agoI would agree. Frontend ecosystems and idioms have changed frequently, each time adding a new layer of concepts. Backend architecture has progressed but the concepts are pretty stable. Caching, authentication, roles, models, interpolated templates and so on. Same toolkit but more refined.
- mrmonkeyman 7y agoGoogle is getting worse though. I sometimes find myself using duck or gasp, bing. Damn SEO BS is killing it.
- pteraspidomorph 7y agoI suspect Google Search can no longer function as well as it once did without being informed by everything Google knows about you (malicious use of SEO might very well be the reason). You could try fiddling with the privacy settings in your account, especially if you blocked anything (edit: or remove privacy protections from your web browser), and see if that makes it better. I just use DDG for most things these days.
- zrobotics 7y agoEven with all the personalized knowledge Google has, often they still serve worse results than DDG. At this point, I think Google is relying far too much on their historical knowledge about me, since i almost always see results related to previous searches, which clutter the relevant results for my specific search string.
- faissaloo 7y agoI think around 2016 was when I found it had become really difficult to find what I was looking for
- bengale 7y agoExperience is knowing what to search for.
- baroffoos 7y agoAlso 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"
- hybridtupel 7y agoI want to question this. Sure there are many things where a google search brings up a better solution than the own spontaneous one (for example path finding algorithms for games). But every problem beyond a trivial ‘getting started’ needs more thought than an algorithm one can copy and paste from google. Even if it’s only the glue code to bring all parts together or transferring the knowledge to the problem trying to solve. Also what others already mentioned about noisy search results: Deciding which of the (hundreds of) possible solutions might bring the desired outcome is an engineering skill. Another thing: When googling the same issue for the third time one should question why he has not memorized it by now (e.g. syntax of commonly used bash commandos etc.). And by internalizing one gets better as engineer every day without relying on google.
- learc83 7y agoYeah for some reason software engineers love self depreciation. It's like we've internalized management's desire to make us low status cogs Doctors google things, captial E Engineers google things, chefs google things, everyone googles things. Yet you don't hear them talking like this to the extent we do. Like you said it's knowing what to type into Google, knowing how to filter the results, and knowing how to apply the information you that's the hard part.
- pi-victor 7y ago^ this. so very much this. for getting started guides, it's great, although even there i'd exercise a lot of caution. there's a lot of info from people who are not experience that people just replicate in their code/setup which isn't really a good idea. for complex issues you never drown in information. and usually when you find something it probably doesn't apply to your setup. that doesn't mean you can't, at least, get some idea or a pointer to the right solution. however, just googling or stackoverflowing, i'd be wary of implementing any solution without any thought just because someone else solved it before me.
- hybridtupel 7y agoYes, exactly! There are tons of getting started guides for everything but beyond that, one will find a wasteland of information most of the time or it is scattered around in different locations. So in this case the engineer is working hard to figure out which pieces of the puzzle belong in which place. Not to mention that nobody knows how the finished puzzle has to look like.
- fencepost 7y agoI know folks who've gotten pushback from clients of "I'm not paying you to just Google things, fix my problem!" My recommended response is "Nope, you're paying me to understand what's happening, look for possibly relevant information about why, understand what results are and are not relevant, and apply what I've looked up."
- robocat 7y agoIt feels weird when you go to a doctor and they start googling in front of you, for what seems something relatively common and simple.
- fencepost 7y agoI'd rather they be searching in UpToDate.com, but one of the most important things in diagnosis is the ability to filter available information and determine relevance. If you have identifiable symptoms that don't fit with the "hoofbeats means a horse" common diagnosis then someone able to take that starting point and get other possibilities to evaluate is good to have.
- badatshipping 7y agoThis just shows how shallow web programming is in intellectual content. If your expertise consists of stuff that can be looked up on the fly, all you need to join the field is a high enough IQ to comprehend those ideas at all. There’s no need for deep thinking or mastery. In what other technical field can you simply google everything? And is that because other fields are merely more obscure, or because they’re actually harder? Could one be a mathematician or physicist by googling things?
- Edmond 7y agoMaybe referring to Physicists and Mathematicians googling is a bit glib but almost certainly they do a whole lot of "Googling" by way of being familiar with what others have done...it is the only way to be effective. Knowing how to quickly find what you need is not in conflict with mastery...besides, we are talking about web apps here, most dev teams wont have much patient with a developer spending a ton of time reinventing wheels when there are ready-made solutions.
- ben509 7y agoAs someone who works on math intensive back-end stuff, and routinely can't google things, I'll defend web-devs: Most occupations are not intellectual in the slightest, nor do they require a high IQ. They do require other talents, though, such as a sense of aesthetics or technical ability, in this case. Not being intellectually rigorous doesn't mean they don't require careful thought or mastery. I could absolutely perform any of the individual steps required to design a website, and have done this. But I either rely on somebody else's template or my designs tend to look like shit. Mostly, I think, the sheer patience to tweak CSS, let alone testing it on a dozen browsers and mobile devices, is often beyond me. Or (Christ, be my shield) dealing with end users. The simple act of repetitively designing many hundreds of websites and then getting feedback from actual people as to how they work with those sites, that is mastery and it does take careful thought. So, yes, they're constantly looking up "recipes" to combine into code. Speaking as someone who is on the "tool-making" side of the house, that's the point. I want to make tools that other people can use and combine into new things; if I write a compiler, the goal is that someone can use it without having to learn compiler theory.
- karmakaze 7y agoMy 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 avoiding the run-of-the-mill complexity problems using common patterns or data-structures is sufficient. When they're not (e.g. performance or scale constraints), also fun times.
- o-__-o 7y agoWhat do you do about license tainting in your code base? Stack overflow provides all of its answers under a Creative Commons license. An example may have been lifted from a GPL source, do you care that you have contributed this to your community project or corporate employers code? If the answer is no, then why care if you google or not
- karmakaze 7y agoI'm not sure you can licence how to do x in language or y with framework in a license as the code is not being copy/pasted but rather used as documentation on how to do things.
- sbuttgereit 7y agoI wish that were always true. I worked at a place where I was working on a feature that had to integrate with some code that a consulting group had developed for us. As I looked at their code, I knew that it had been developed by a single developer in their group, but it was odd in how completely disjointed the code was... even in individual source files; it was like it was developed by a team that didn't talk or plan together: no consistency in naming, functional boundaries, code style, etc. This had raised some red flags for me... so I took some snippets and googled them. Sure enough, the code was largely an assembly of cut/paste code units from various blogs, Stack Overflow, etc. that had been glued together with only small changes made to get the disparate bits to talk to each other. The applications we were building were IP sensitive and the developer and consulting group had represented this as original work. No indication of where the code originated came in any form or communication. Truth is that enough of this copied code was sufficiently verbatim that there would have been no question as to copyright ownership (not us or the consulting group) and with many questions regarding as to if we had copyleft license terms, permissive terms... or had no license at all to use the works. Naturally this led to much unhappiness on our part and had both sides going for their contract terms. It also didn't help that our company's products were substantially business legal services and close to half of the employees at that time were attorneys. This isn't to say we didn't use many of the same resources in our internally developed code: but we did so as you suggested... as documentation and knowledge sharing. We also were fairly scrupulous about stating where ideas and techniques we learned this way originated via code comments including links to the source we relied on.
- mmcnl 7y agoAsking the right questions is a very valuable skill in all professions.
- nothrabannosir 7y agoand the ability to identify the correct answer, even if you couldn't have given it yourself.
- sonnyblarney 7y agoDocumentation might be the most overlooked aspect of technology. Every time a user has to ask a simple question and they have access to the docs, I see it as a 'product fail'.
- jrs95 7y agoJust do some work in a dead framework for a couple years and then you'll be good to go. Even something as recent as Ember has little to no information on places like StackOverflow for the last 3-4 years, so you actually have to look at docs and source code instead.
- HillaryBriss 7y agoHas anyone faced an interview question like: "Ok, we have to invert this binary tree. Now what would you google to solve this?"
- scarlac 7y agoI 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.
- animal531 7y agoYou 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.
- detaro 7y agoNot quite so directly, but I've had interviews where it was ok to search for things.
- thrower123 7y agoThis is my life. Apparently it is what sets me apart from most people; somehow I'm blessed with this ability to read things, highlight them, hit CTRL-C, open a web browser, hit CTRL-V, and hit enter. Most people, according to my empirical studies, are simply not capable of doing this... I wish I was being snarky, but this is literally true
- noonespecial 7y agoExperience is knowing what to type into the search bar. Wisdom is knowing which result to use.
- LoSboccacc 7y agothis is only a partial aspect of the issue. it's true that in the current "move fast break everything" climate developer knowledge expires at an alarming rate and everything needs to be rechecked constantly trough internet sources to fix integration issues between ever changing libraries it's also true that searching sources without a solid knowledge base derived from theory and practice quickly devolves into cargo-cult programming. I too sometimes feel like my skill differential often comes only from being very fast at googling stuff, however this is a gross oversimplification on what happens after the specific knowledge piece is acquired: whether the solution is taken to solve the problem at hand or if it results in a change in one own understanding of the problem domain makes all the difference.
- musgrove 7y agoYou, and 10,000,000 other people out there.
- baron816 7y agoThis 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.
- robertAngst 7y ago> 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.
- trakout 7y agoThis. 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).
- diminoten 7y agoI'm sorry but I literally don't believe you, especially if you're working in a space as quickly-evolving as frontend development...
- evo_9 7y agoKnowing how to find the answer is an often underestimated trait of successful developers. When I interview someone I often ask them what they will do if I'm out-of-the-office, no other senior devs are around, and they need to find the answer to continue to be product - what do you do? You would be surprised how many times I hear 'wait for you to return', versus 'I'd fire up duck-duck-go or search stack overflow'.
- espeed 7y ago"The power of the unaided mind is greatly exaggerated. It is 'things' that make us smart, the cognitive artifacts that allow human beings to overcome the limitations of human memory and conscious reasoning." - Donald A. Norman, Things That Make Us Smart https://jnd.org/things_that_make_us_smart_forbes_article/ https://jnd.org/things_that_make_us_smart_forbes_article/
- janpot 7y agoI'd say that finding relevant information fast is one of the primary skills of a developer.
- thetruthseeker1 7y agoI think this guy wrote a great article. However I don’t know if I agree with his conclusion of him not being a good web developer. I would bet that most great developers have googled often enough. In their defense googling is a more efficient tool than pouring through manpages all the time that have poor search indexes. Also, in this developer’s blog, there is no reference to the fact that his code is buggy or less maintainable, or plethora of other reasons that categorically make him a bad developer. I think it’s ok, to use help from google or stack overflow to do a good job at your task and that doesn’t make you a bad programmer.
- zxcvbn4038 7y agoSo one of the things that the author should Google is “salesmanship“. Everybody uses Google as a reference, no shame in that. Everyone uses spell check also. But would you go into an interview and proclaim your a lousy typist dependent on spellcheck? Putting your full real name on a blog and announcing to the world that your a lousy developer, that is just as bad. Much like cops posting racists rants, people on disability pay posting their jet ski antics, and criminals showing off their latest score. I’m sure every one of those people thought it was a good idea at the time, but it’s not, and the internet never forgets. Author should also Google “MacGregor the brick layer”.
- shervinafshar 7y agoThe interviewer who expects me to have every little detail about every single technology I've used in the past stacked up in my mind, won't be worth my time, not to mention joining their company. The comparison to spelling prowess is apples and...melons. Use your favorite search engine to look up "what is the difference between insight and information?"
- zxcvbn4038 7y agoThere are absolutely people out there who expect that — and they are usually the ones who can’t figure out why they can’t find anyone to fill their position. A lot of times a manager won’t interview someone until their people have, and it’s those front line people that are always the worst because they are fresh out of college and just like school they expect you to answer random questions from memory, obscure questions to make sure you didn’t just study up, and if your % correct is too low then goodbye. A lot of times they are the gate keepers to otherwise good positions, so helps to be prepared for them. Once your hired you can go turn down the brightness on their monitors to mess with them.
- Pxtl 7y agoA 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 feels like half my job is googling how to do common things in popular libraries and finding completely counter-intuitive pain-points.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- thatoneuser 7y agoA 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 inability to use the underlying features effectively.
- Acen 7y agoI 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 circumstances. But nothing interlinking at anything past the basic level. Trial and error is brutal.
- hallman76 7y agoYou're trying to take off while still building the plane. So is AWS.
- 7y ago
- RickJWagner 7y agoYes, true. I'm a middleware support engineer. A reasonable amount of experience, coupled with Google, will solve many problems.
- amanzi 7y agoThis is not just for webdev roles. We used to joke about this in my sysadmin days - when hiring new staff, the only test should be how effectively they could Google for a particular solution. And in all seriousness, understanding how Google works and how to use the search operators effectively, is a crucial skill in an IT career. Edit: relevant XKCD - https://xkcd.com/979/ https://xkcd.com/979/ (and the only thing worse than that comic, is finding someone who had the same problem as you and they followed up with a simple "I solved this" with no additional details!)
- FooHentai 7y agoRate of change is the biggest driver for this, at least for me. It's rare that I'm covering the same territory twice, so it's novel research all the time. That said, the search output wouldn't be of any use without being able to relate it to past experience and accepted practices.
- stevewillows 7y agoI think this is true for most technical jobs. What makes us good is that we understand how to search, which leads us to the corners of the internet where other technically minded people seek help and answer questions. I've seen friends and family search for errors or 'how do I...', and their searches mostly yield youtube videos and scraper sites. For me its mostly SE, reddit, and product specific forums. Knowing how to ask the right questions and understanding jargon is often the greatest asset.
- sys_64738 7y agoI found for web development that to google is simply the fastest way to a solution I'm trying to solve immediately. It is all about rushing to fix the next problem in code. Need to do something new? You can enter a few keywords and the solution pops up. For most folks this search then copy/paste is the extent of programming nowadays. The deeper stuff where we all get enjoyment from programming done without google may be a thing of the past.
- verisimilitudes 7y agoThere'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.
- InafuSabi 7y agoLove 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
- julius_set 7y agoThere’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.”
- aliswe 7y ago> Khaliq Gant is the creator of this website ... That's funny, khaliq means creator in arabic...