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> read API docs for anything I’m unfamiliar with One of the differences i've noticed between myself and some of the junior devs i've worked with. I would usual
by rvschuilenburg 7y ago
> read API docs for anything I’m unfamiliar with
One of the differences i've noticed between myself and some of the junior devs i've worked with. I would usually use the official docs as my first resource, and they would use stack overflow instead.
- avip 7y agoIt's a common use-case that the best docs are provided on some dude's gist or blogpost. Devs and orgs update the code but don't bother with the forgotten docs. It happens all the time.
- epicide 7y agoAnd the original article here is showing a real-world example of the opposite. Namely, "some dude's gist or blogpost [or stack overflow answer]" not getting updated. Not just that they didn't but that they couldn't. Unsurprisingly, which you should rely on depends heavily on context. It takes experience and patience to figure out which one is correct based on circumstances.
- MperorM 7y agoThis is a hard lesson I had to learn as a junior developer. I'm impatient and Stack overflow can often give me an easy solution. But just as often, it can't and I will spend 30 minutes unproductively trying things with little progress. As I become a better developer I become more inclined to spend 30 minutes with the documentation instead.
- tracker1 7y agoDepends on how clear the documentation/usage is... and sometimes you accept that you have limited knowledge and understanding. Either way, it helps to understand what you are doing, and when in doubt look it up.
- nradov 7y agoIf the library documentation isn't clear then that's a clear sign that whoever created it doesn't take quality seriously and you shouldn't use it in the first place. Of course sometimes there's no alternative so you just have to deal with it.
- penagwin 7y agoI face a lot of anxiety from this. I'll have a task like setting up Point in Time Recovery for postgres, and I've spent days mostly just reading documentation - How postgres manages wal logs, how the internals of several popular solutions work etc. I know it'll be worth it in the long run, but it feels like I'm wasting time because "I'm not doing anything" - I'm not committing any changes while my coworkers are busy adding new features.
- vbezhenar 7y agoWhen you're reading documentation, you also will notice other things in addition to solving your particular problem. Those other things might be helpful few minutes later and you will actually save that time. Or may be tomorrow, if your memory is good. Or may be you'll read those documentation and will actually find a better solution. Of course most of interesting problems are not described in documentation.
- bilekas 7y agoI don't like this blanket statement .. I would use whichever googles first and most relevant results are. Also what the issue is matters. I don't always go to MDN for javascript issues. But if I want to know why something is the way it is, I will.
- theamk 7y agoAs parent said, I don't recommend doing this. In particular, the third-party sources are unlikely get depreciation notes... So unless this is a function you know well, it is almost always better to go to official docs instead.
- yebyen 7y agoI will say that as a Ruby on Rails dev, where many things have changed over time, there are quite a lot of highly voted StackOverflow posts where they go into detail about what the answer is on the date of posting, then someone comments "this is different in Rails 4.1+!" and the responder will revisit the answer and revise it to include applicable advice for whichever version you might be on. This is not granted, but it happens a lot. Although if the docs are good, you should definitely expect to find good information about deprecation notices there, too! But it's not at all uncommon for conversations about code, on StackOverflow or wherever else, to include the footnotes about what is different and what version changed it.
- calcifer 7y ago> I would use whichever googles first and most relevant results are. The people who made the mistake in the OP probably did exactly that.
- bitwize 7y agoBut what if the docs suck, as is the case with a lot of .io domain libraries?
- fctorial 7y agoIs the io prefix somehow related to software tech?
- Jare 7y agoIt is often used for the following (that I have seen - may be others): - open source libraries - online casual browser games - development/staging environment counterpart to a .com
- SteveSmith16384 7y agoAnd anything MS?
- bitwize 7y agoMicrosoft documentation was historically the gold standard for comprehensiveness and quality. If what the other commenter says (e.g. about their Azure docs) is true, I don't know if things have changed or what. Maybe a post-Nadella culture shift?
- LandR 7y agoA lot of MS documentation now is awful. Azure stuff especially. Sometimes there is just no usable documentation for certain things at all. I've even seen documentation for certain Azure things where it just directs you to Stack Overflow!
- pjc50 7y agoAt one point they "burned the library" and broke a lot of old MSDN urls. It's now common to find dead links to MSDN on old Stackoverflow posts. The documentation is definitely there, but finding it can be a curse. The search is worse than Google, the site is surprisingly slow for a bunch of static text, and the ability to discover something when you don't know the right search terms is poor because Microsoft name everything in the most generic way possible.
- nalllar 7y agoonce have a working dev environment, external docs are the last place to look. IDE type search and doc comments are much more likely to be useful.
- u801e 7y agoI use a combination of both. I'll find something on stack overflow, and then look it up in the official documentation. In other words, treat stack overflow like a sophisticated index to a reference rather than as a reference itself.