
I’m not really a good web developer, I'm just good at Googling things - khaliqgant
https://www.dev-diaries.com/blog/im-just-good-at-googling-things/
======
jim-jim-jim
One 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.

~~~
braythwayt
Speaking as someone who writes blog posts littered with irrelevant pictures
(but never on Medium!), I acknowledge your experience trying to solve a
problem based on a blog post.

Manpages and documentation are written to be references. Blog posts are
written to be tutorials. They have different affordances, and as a result it
is very hard to learn how to use something purely from a reference, and very
different to solve a problem purely from a tutorial.

That’s why really decent reference sites have both step by-step tutorials AND
references designed to answer questions quickly and to be easily searchable.

If there is an opportunity here, it is for search to understand the difference
and know how to present the two kinds of results differently.

That way, if you question is, “How does this thing work?” You should get
tutorials. If your question is much more specific, like “what parameters does
this take?” You should get a reference.

Or something hand-wave-y along those lines.

~~~
pteraspidomorph
For js and js-adjacent technologies or libraries, there sometimes aren't any
references to speak of, unfortunately. You're supposed to divine the
information you need from task-oriented texts and code snippets.

~~~
LandR
I'm a developer.

When I work with most stuff that isn't web dev, life is good. I can figure
most stuff out painlessly. It's mostly feels like working on a space that has
been designed and documented by someone sane.

When I'm forced to do Web dev type stuff... I want to jump off the roof. It
always makes me question my life choices that led to me being exposed to js. I
hate it, it's a logically incoherent disaster that feels like its been deigned
by people who are all just winging it and sorely lacking a good CS degree. It
all just feels immature and feels like it's a field trying to develop
methadologies while ignoring lessons of the past and as a result making
mistakes they shouldn't be.

Once you get into this npm / node nonsense it feels like proper wild west
madness.

I'm sure it will mature some day. I'll probably be retired by then though.
Then again maybe the entire eco system is doomed to a future of just constant
nonsensical churn and the solution is just therapy or install nets on the tall
buildings to catch devs, who after spending another day hating js, decide to
junp off the roof!

Another problem is I don't see many Web developers wanting to learn when they
encounter something they don't understand, instead they just want some code
they can copy and paste that had the illusion of solving their problem.
Understanding be damned. Or even better a library, and hey if it has a million
dependencies... Well.. That's life right?

~~~
mockingbirdy
> and sorely lacking a good CS degree

Someone is speaking the truth here. But we (as a web dev I'll try to speak for
us) are learning: React and Vue (and all the other great libraries) use
optimized vdoms, React teaches functional programming paradigms with immutable
data structures (redux) and we've already learnt from Ember what components
we'll need in a project.

Most people will simply follow blindly. After the base stops moving (breaking
changes in the APIs - Vue is currently doing the last big ones), we will write
the best practices. Every half-decently educated developer already understands
that those ideas are not new. They are the same ones they've already had in
the 60s. They will try to do it better - maybe they really are more clever,
right? - but after the third or fourth try they'll understand that their own
half-baked solution doesn't stand a chance. And then they will realize that
life is too short to lose some data because your file-based DB implementation
isn't ACID.

------
Pxtl
A 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.

~~~
thatoneuser
A 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
I 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
You're trying to take off while still building the plane. So is AWS.

------
kawsper
Using 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.

~~~
xwdv
Every Google search you do is a lost opportunity for an unexpected
conversation. Imagine never meeting a wife because you did a Google search
instead.

~~~
BossingAround
Also imagine meeting your wife because you did a search query. Since we're in
a purely hypothetical plane, both of these are equally plausible.

~~~
NegativeK
That doesn't make any intuitive sense.

Meeting people starts with conversations.

~~~
danielmg
Not the way I do it.

~~~
max_
How do u do it?

------
travisoneill1
Google is not a search engine. It is a memory upgrade, and anybody who tries
to write software with a standard human memory is obsolete.

~~~
thejohnconway
To stretch the analogy a bit: it’s like virtual memory. Not as fast as RAM,
but there’s an effectively infinite amount of it.

~~~
maxxxxx
Probably a good analogy. And it's also incredibly slow so you need to have a
good amount of RAM and CPU cache.

------
karmakaze
My 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
What 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
I'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
I 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.

------
adamgamble
This 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?

------
hybridtupel
I 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.

~~~
pi-victor
^ 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
Yes, 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.

------
amanzi
This 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
Rate 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.

------
baron816
This 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
> 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
This. 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).

------
supakeen
I 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).

~~~
ehnto
I 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.

------
phalangion
I'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.

~~~
klez
Of 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__
I 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.

~~~
imjustsaying
This 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?'

------
kumarvvr
The 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
I 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
I 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
Yes 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".

------
thecrumb
“Never memorize something that you can look up.” ~ Albert Einstein

~~~
james_s_tayler
On the contrary, do. Having things in working memory is the core of creative
problem solving.

------
fencepost
I 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
It 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
I'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.

------
thrower123
This 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

------
thetruthseeker1
I 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.

------
themark
If it weren't for google, I would be a great janitor.

------
mrmonkeyman
Google is getting worse though. I sometimes find myself using duck or gasp,
bing.

Damn SEO BS is killing it.

~~~
pteraspidomorph
I 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
Even 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.

------
alobat72
I always tell new developers ‚developing is a lot of reading and a little
writing‘

------
HillaryBriss
Has anyone faced an interview question like: "Ok, we have to invert this
binary tree. Now what would you google to solve this?"

~~~
scarlac
I 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
You 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.

------
julius_set
There’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.”

------
mmcnl
Asking the right questions is a very valuable skill in all professions.

~~~
nothrabannosir
and the ability to identify the correct answer, even if you couldn't have
given it yourself.

------
jrs95
Just 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.

------
InafuSabi
Love 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

------
zxcvbn4038
So 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
The 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
There 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.

------
stevewillows
I 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.

------
espeed
"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/)

------
evo_9
Knowing 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'.

------
verisimilitudes
There'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.

------
LoSboccacc
this 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.

------
RandomBacon
A good <anything> can find answers and apply them to their specific situation.

------
noonespecial
Experience is knowing what to type into the search bar.

Wisdom is knowing which result to use.

------
badatshipping
This 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?

~~~
ben509
As 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.

~~~
badatshipping
I understand the point you’re making here, but having done webdev for about
five years now this has just not been the experience of me or anyone I know.
Admittedly, limited sample size and all.

 _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._

If I were at a party I would appreciate my job being described this way, but
the reality is that webdev is mostly applied common sense + having a lot of
the kind of knowledge that is googlable. Like, I’m successful career wise and
I’m regarded as being quite good at my job, yet I don’t feel like I’ve
mastered anything per se.

Whereas for my side project, an IDE for Golang, I feel I’ve actually had to
_learn difficult concepts_ that couldn’t be re-learned from a blog post.

I take back what I said about webdev not requiring thought, which was an
exaggeration.

------
sys_64738
I 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.

------
RickJWagner
Yes, true.

I'm a middleware support engineer. A reasonable amount of experience, coupled
with Google, will solve many problems.

------
janpot
I'd say that finding relevant information fast is one of the primary skills of
a developer.

------
aliswe
> Khaliq Gant is the creator of this website ...

That's funny, khaliq means creator in arabic...

------
bengale
Experience is knowing what to search for.

~~~
baroffoos
Also 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"

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sbhn
I can solve any problem, in any language using google, which will probably
forward me onto stackexchange or Github.

~~~
tannhaeuser
Which begs the question why we're not going straight to stackexchange. I'm
doing the same btw, just using DDG instead.

~~~
klez
Because somehow the search function on SE mostly sucks. I tried a couple of
times (especially when flagging duplicates) and it's really hard. I usually
just revert to Google or ddg.

------
musgrove
You, and 10,000,000 other people out there.

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sonnyblarney
Documentation 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'.

