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Get really good at googling and bias to do it in more situations than you think you need and always earlier than you think you need. If you're working remotely
by vasco 4y ago
Get really good at googling and bias to do it in more situations than you think you need and always earlier than you think you need. If you're working remotely do it live in meetings / planning as well and use it as an extension of your brain. There's no advantage in discussing a problem and only investigating it after you speak to someone if you can do it in parallel right away. If you treat the search engine as an extension of your brain rather than a crutch that means every google is you admiting you don't know something, you'll reap many rewards.
I've definitely gotten way more value of learning to google better and faster than being good at some editor or IDE shortcuts.
This also includes getting very familiar with the docs of the tools you use, knowing the ins and outs of them. Something you learn when you study for Red Hat / AWS / k8s certifications where you can consult docs is that the best way to be efficient during the exam is to be efficient looking at docs. Apply that to everything.
- bncy 4y ago>do it in more situations than you think you need and always earlier than you think you need. I can't even count how many this I should just apply that. It's an obvious thing but it takes time to getting used to clearly formulating your problems. Search engines are so sofisticated nowadays that you don't even necessarily need to know what you're looking for and it just pops up. I think of it as a sort of hive mind thing, internet became a natural extension of our brains.
- alldayeveryday 4y ago> Get really good at googling Those moments when you are sitting there trying to figure out how to explain in search engine friendly terms the problem you have.
- vasco 4y agoNowadays I think you will find that if you speak to the search engine in the form of a question and in as plain terms as possible you'll have better results than by formulating it in keywords and google-fu like in the early days. I find that developers who "try to think in search engine" have gotten increasingly worse results over time as the search engine adapted to the general population's way of using it. This is all personal anecdata though, so you might want to try different ways that work for you.
- alldayeveryday 4y agoThis makes sense - however the search engine is just a proxy to the content on websites. I should have probably been more clear in my original comment. What I was really referring to, is when you are sitting there trying to think how other people might ask a question when the way you are originally asking it is not turning up good results.
- Brian_K_White 4y agoMany times someone essentially solved their problem while in the act of formulating the question to ask me what to do about it. "glad to help, any time!"
- waffles2021 4y agoBeing able to use search engines is a definite skill that certainly cannot be understated. Once upon a time we'd have shelves of $100 books to pore over, and that would take time in itself. Being able to use the correct terminology and the correct search engine logic will help in delivering software faster.
- m3ss1 4y ago@vasco Any tips/resources you would like to share on how to get better at googling?
- lvqz 4y agoin case you didn't know about it, google search operators are very useful to improve your queries (you can find them here for example : https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators)