[HN Gopher] Can you make a basic web app without googling? I can't
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Can you make a basic web app without googling? I can't
Author : azhenley
Score : 102 points
Date : 2021-01-29 19:40 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (web.eecs.utk.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.eecs.utk.edu)
| henning wrote:
| It matters if you're applying for a job and the people
| interviewing or the hiring manager think you should.
|
| People like Mike Acton and Jonathan Blow give incredibly
| condescending speeches about "practice" like you should be able
| to just make a Win32 API app that calls DirectX (or some other
| comically absurdly bad API) from memory. Blow in particular loves
| harping on this and loves saying that web developers are
| incompetent and wasting their time creating awful products.
|
| How much time do you spend making new apps on long-lived
| projects? At many companies, the answer is zero. These same
| companies may think you suck shit at programming if you can't
| remember command line options you never have to use in day-to-day
| work.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Can you build a house with one arm tied behind your back? I'm
| sure someone theoretically could, but not why anyone would. Is
| relying on having two hands a detriment to being a handyman? Does
| such a person lack critical expertise?
|
| Professionals use the tools at their disposal. Instant access to
| the sum of all human knowledge is an incredibly powerful tool,
| and you don't get any bonus points for leaving it in your
| toolbox.
| dusted wrote:
| I can, but it will be basic! I might have to use a JSON file for
| the backend because I probably can't remember any database libs
| well enough to use without documentation.
|
| However, lots of programming is much closer to plumming than to..
| programming.. any time you're using a lib or api, you're just
| looking up what kind of fittings that comes with and what length
| of pipe to attach to it.. So don't worry about not being able to
| do anything really useful without looking in the docs :)
|
| Now, if you have to look up basic language syntax for the
| language you use every day, I'd say its bad and you probably need
| to practice a bit ^_^
| bch wrote:
| > use without documentation
|
| Of course people's projects can be unique, and my work may not
| be representative of the readers work, but I guess this raises
| the question: what does "using Google" mean? I frequently use
| "lots of things" on my computer: man pages, other installed
| documentation, will browse source code of libraries I'm using,
| or indeed my own previous work. I can do this if, say, I have
| no Internet connection, but that doesn't mean I've got a fully-
| formed bug-free implementation of my goal floating around in my
| photographic memory.
| dusted wrote:
| It's a good point, I take it to mean search for how to use or
| do something, even as google is becoming worse at finding
| things, it's still often waaay better than the search
| functionality available on the websites of many libraries and
| utilities.
|
| So yeah, I guess I take it to also mean searching through
| local documentation, but I know that's maybe not what was
| meant.
| burlesona wrote:
| Yeah I would say this is exactly right.
|
| You should be able to learn at least one language deeply enough
| that, given sufficient time, you could do just about anything
| without libraries or external dependencies, and therefore
| without needing additional documentation. Aspiring to and
| eventually developing that level of language mastery is, IMO,
| one of the core signs of maturity for a Software Engineer.
|
| However, that would be wildly impractical in our day to day
| work, which is more about connecting pieces together in the
| right way, and hence is a lot about reading the manual for
| those pieces, understanding what it is they do and how they
| should be assembled together, and then actually assembling them
| together and testing that it all worked as expected. "Googling
| things" is an essential step in that process, but you could
| substitute Google for "read the manual" in an earlier era and
| it would be the same thing.
|
| Perhaps what is sad is how many things these days ship without
| good manuals, because Google makes it easy enough for people to
| stitch together scanty release notes, comments in the source
| code, blog posts, Stack Overflow questions, etc. that you can
| actually get away with not having a manual.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| > You should be able to learn at least one language deeply
| enough that, given sufficient time, you could do just about
| anything without libraries or external dependencies, and
| therefore without needing additional documentation. Aspiring
| to and eventually developing that level of language mastery
| is, IMO, one of the core signs of maturity for a Software
| Engineer.
|
| I don't understand why so much emphasis is put on being able
| to do this without consulting the docs. Sure, it's nice to be
| able to pound out the most basic valid HTML page without
| googling it, but that's hardly a web app. If you need a
| backend component, I suspect the ecosystems where you can
| make anything practical using only built-in functions (no
| libs) are in the minority. You'd end up doing ridiculous
| stuff like using the filesystem as a database, plain
| javascript on the client side, node's builtin http in the
| backend. People with years of expertise may be able to do
| this, but it's just a side effect of having been steeped in
| the tech stacks for so long. I don't agree that being able to
| do this is something worth aspiring to. Rather, people should
| aspire to moving efficiently within their ecosystems and
| conserving mental space by knowing where to find things
| quickly.
| nwsm wrote:
| I've been developing web apps and related services professionally
| for 3 years and use google for work almost every day.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Something that has dramatically reduced my reliance on outside
| resources is an editor that can lookup symbol definitions.
|
| I'm using Django and I used to use Sublime Text without any
| plugins which meant (at the time) it couldn't automatically show
| me the definition of a function or object from a library, forcing
| me to search around for its documentation.
|
| Switching to PyCharm/IntelliJ meant I could now just Command-
| Click (Ctrl-Click for Linux & Windows I believe) and see the
| actual definition and logic of the underlying function without
| having to rely on the online documentation. This of course works
| recursively, so I can repeat this process again and again up
| until I eventually reach the core standard library which is in C
| and isn't introspective (at this point I can rely on my knowledge
| or some trial and error to figure out its behavior).
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| I'd argue that's just having Google-lite built into your IDE.
|
| Personally I think that focusing on how you solve the problem
| loses sight of the fact that the only important thing is that
| you can accomplish the mission. If you can't build a basic web
| app on your own, but you can while salsa dancing w/ a mountain
| gorilla, I'll pay for your subscription to Spotify so you can
| stream Havana Kings while tearing up the dance floor w/ a
| Silverback (must provide own gorilla).
| DangitBobby wrote:
| Well, it's not really like having "Google-lite" built in
| because all of that information is available on your
| filesystem. It's more like knowing exactly where your site-
| packages are and being very skilled with grep or some other
| search tool.
| TrianguloY wrote:
| For me, and I think the majority, memory is where you keep what
| your brain thinks that it will use again.
|
| If your job is to make and fix/tweak the style of a web page, and
| you do it practically everyday, you probably can make a pretty
| decent css file without even looking away from the editor. But if
| you then need to make a basic html page, you will probably
| search.
|
| If you use an ide with autocompletion, you probably won't
| remember the correct camelCase of even common functions (is it
| instaceof or instaceOf?) but if you work on an embedded system
| with a plain console editor you probably remember them all (or at
| least the most used ones).
|
| I remember when I was actively using Lightning Launcher (an
| android launcher with JavaScript capabilities) that I could make
| full scripts almost without pressing delete, when its editor was
| simply a big textarea (no autocompletion, no colors, not even
| automatic indentation). I did need to check the docs from time to
| time, but their limited (and logical) set of basic functions made
| it easy for me to remember. Nowadays I need to check everything
| again, because I simply forgot due to not using it much.
|
| Answering the question: yes, yes I can, a very basic but working
| one, simply because I like making small tool pages for myself,
| coding directly from my phone (in a basic text editor). But when
| I need to do something not so basic, like checking if the user
| has scrolled to the bottom of the page, I search it.
| danaliv wrote:
| _> For me, and I think the majority, memory is where you keep
| what your brain thinks that it will use again._
|
| There's some pedagogical theory around this. (I learned this
| through the FAA's instructor training.) Sort of common sense
| stuff, but it's helpful for structuring learning. Basically
| you'll remember things that you use a lot, have used recently,
| experienced intensely (e.g. actually used rather than just read
| about), and had fun learning. In addition, the first way you
| learn to do something tends to stick.
|
| Cite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_learning
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I love googling and stackoverflowing. I know a great deal, but
| I'm like Kelly Bundy; I can only hold so much in my pretty little
| head.
|
| I generally forget stuff a week after last using it, and am
| googling even the most basic things.
|
| In a few days, I'm gonna have to put my Swift code aside for a
| week or two, while I modify my backend (PHP). I guarantee that
| I'll be like duuu-uhhh for the first couple of days, with serious
| Google-Jistu katas.
|
| Then, the same thing will happen again, when I switch back to the
| Swift frontend.
|
| I tend to avoid using dependencies, so I write a lot of code.
| INTPenis wrote:
| I could if I had the framework docs. I have also made a few
| boilerplate projects to make it easier and faster to get started
| with simple stuff like Flask modular app and tornado consumer
| daemon.
|
| If I had a book on each framework I use with their docs reference
| material I could do without Google.
|
| It's a fun question but can it really happen realistically? I
| mean if there is still a demand for web apps then there is most
| likely some sort of way to index the existing web and search it.
| Even if that isn't google anymore.
| olenin wrote:
| I couldn't, some undoubtedly could, but that's not the point.
| What a wonderfully posed question with much broader implications,
| especially relevant to Australians ATM vis a vis the government's
| attempted tussle with the big people. I hope this discussion
| spreads. This is a thank you message. Cheers.
| djhaskin987 wrote:
| People used to buy big books and stick to languages with more
| batteries included. I still remember the big huge fat Java book I
| bought when I was in high school.
| tomcooks wrote:
| As a sidenote on the availability of Google to look things up,
| how often do you find yourself stuck on a problem and locked into
| a result bubble where Google keeps on showing you the wrong
| results, usually spammy articles?
| ksec wrote:
| I would not be surprised if even Professional Web Developers cant
| do it. Especially if you include deployment.
|
| This isn't the old days of FTP, Perl or PHP anymore. There are
| too much information I cant memorise every single bit of it. And
| I dont think you should either. Especially in the age of Google.
| My memory capacity has its limit, and there are things I just
| decide it is not important enough to memorise when I could easily
| search for it. ( Or if I am relying on Heroku )
|
| I have long thought of Directing a video, where we have famous
| Developers, or developers from a pieces of software that normal
| people would have heard of, filming them doing work, looking up
| silly things in Google. Starring at the screen for hours and
| absolutely dont have a clue what the code is doing. Not typing
| any code for hours. Sort of like Reality TV shows for
| Programmers.
|
| Hollywood Movies and Anime has made the perception that proper
| Software programmers should be super fast touch typist and typing
| code with insane speed. It makes people uneasy when they learn
| programming. It turns out they have to constantly look up some
| manual, googling, copy and pasting and for most of the time not
| typing anything. They thought they are just not any good at it
| and many simply gave up.
|
| The reality is, hopefully the video would show, even top level
| programmers dont know everything. And it is perfectly normal to
| look things up.
| joshspankit wrote:
| You could probably sell and create this as a "coding reality
| show" with live camera and screen feed.
|
| Maybe a "Big brother season 1" style. I'd watch that.
| treis wrote:
| >I would not be surprised if even Professional Web Developers
| cant do it. Especially if you include deployment.
|
| I'm pretty sure I could do it depending on our definition of
| basic web app. With something Rails it's not even really that
| hard. Rails g scaffold [Model] gets you 95% of the way there.
| wffurr wrote:
| In the old days, we had books and offline documentation (CHM,
| local HTML, man pages, etc.) to supplement our memory.
|
| Things are more complex, but a lot of documentation is also now
| online instead of printed or distributed on floppies.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I'm reasonably sure I could write a basic site, make it look as
| good as I can make things look given my sense of design,
| without searching.
|
| If I was allowed to look at what I already have on my machine I
| could even set up a build process for my site. If not allowed
| then no build process.
|
| But it would probably be pretty slow to write this, depending
| on how basic the site was, and it would not be as good as if I
| could look things up when I needed to.
|
| But I wouldn't be able to deploy without searching.
| colecut wrote:
| I remain living happily in the old days of PHP, somehow making
| functioning applications and being paid well. Life is easy and
| good.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Do you live in Europe?
| jellygraph wrote:
| Or perhaps the Soviet Union.
| colecut wrote:
| San Diego, California
| hrjfkgkgk wrote:
| it's hilarious. people using ruby and python and wondering
| why they cant build web apps without copy pasting stuff off
| of stack overflow.
| viraptor wrote:
| The question is not about stackoverflow, but googling in
| general. As in, without project documentation accessible.
| hrjfkgkgk wrote:
| in the php world you usually have decent man pages for
| webservers handling php requests and generally speaking
| php frameworks and packages have good inline
| documentation. also there is a package for anything you
| may need and and ide will usually give hints based on
| that documentation.
|
| most frameworks come either with examples or commands to
| get your started. symfony even had their docs available
| for local reading as well.
|
| with python i always have to delve into reading obscure
| documentation that either makes no sense or is not up to
| date. and there are too few packages for what you
| normally need in a scalable app. so yeah you can write
| php code without googling, as long as you are not a
| complete noob in web development.
|
| if its 2021 and you still write code using vim and niche
| languages then you are doing it wrong, and indeed google
| is your only hope.
| viraptor wrote:
| There's nothing unique here. Virtually all libraries and
| languages have local version of docs. I think you're too
| biased to continue in good faith argument.
| cvhashim wrote:
| Some developers already livestream on YouTube as they program
| up web apps or other software. George Hotz for example used to
| livestream on YouTube/twitch. You can find many others.
| offtop5 wrote:
| Flutter web + auto complete with VS code. Even then it feels like
| an exercise in futility
| icedchai wrote:
| There's so much involved, it's almost impossible to do many
| things from memory, especially across all different languages,
| frameworks, tools, platforms, etc. In the old days (for me, late
| 80's to early 90's, programming without the Internet), I remember
| having books next to the computer. Things were much simpler then.
| makach wrote:
| Don't worry about it. Googling has come to stay. There is a lot
| of skills related to identifying what piece of code is relevant
| for your purpose.
|
| No skills are basically required. No one is expected to do a
| basic web app from scratch - heck - most IDEs has boilerplate for
| creating a web app.
| sixdimensional wrote:
| This is slightly perplexing. I love the intention of this post.
| Some thoughts..
|
| I feel one could argue that there is a chicken-and-egg problem
| here. Nobody could code anything without a reference to start
| from. But, then, who developed the first language without a
| reference?
|
| Ah, there - the start of something - those who invented the first
| programming languages - the very concept of "stored programs" as
| punches on a card, for example - assembly language, etc. - they
| did not have a reference. They invented the reference. But, it
| was also, by today's standards - much "simpler" and a much
| "smaller surface area" - while probably quite technologically
| complex and difficult for those at the time.
|
| But after that, everyone else, who didn't invent the technology,
| but was rather using it.. was therefore - by definition - using a
| reference. Standing on the shoulders of giants... how else to
| learn?
|
| For instance, I learned BASIC coding first by studying other
| people's examples - in magazines, by looking at code that came
| with my first compiler as samples, reading books. Same way I
| learned Pascal and C++ - the tooling/IDEs back then couldn't
| "help you learn" with autocomplete.. you learned when you wrote
| something, and it either compiled or it didn't. You learned by
| using "help" or books or talking to people or looking at
| examples.
|
| I'd argue that even those who invent most things today are
| inventing it at a higher level of abstraction, and therefore
| still looking at references for levels below the level of
| abstraction they work at.
|
| So.. "can you make a basic web app without googling"? Well,
| actually, yes, sure I can. But that is because I learned HTML,
| CSS, JS (and supporting languages like Perl, PHP, etc.) when the
| surface area was still small - from the Internet itself, by
| looking at examples and reading things like the entire HTML
| specification when it was smaller. Then I memorized it by doing
| it.. a lot. Then things changed, but a lot of the basics are
| still possible to do today and still work. That said - "will that
| basic web app work in every browser platform or any every
| server/OS platform that exists"? Well, if you stick to the true
| basics, possibly yes - but, this raises the question of
| technology and implementation variability and complexity.
|
| I think the bigger question being posed here, isn't the
| headline... it would be better to ask, "does it matter if you
| can't make a basic web app without Googling"? There, I think, is
| the point of the post - and - yes, it matters in a lot of ways.
| But if you are coding for the web - presumably you are already
| using the web.. so.. perhaps that specifically is not as
| important as the next bigger question...
|
| "Has writing code for modern systems become so diverse and
| complex, and the surface area so large, that it is difficult to
| build systems? Has the variability and diversity of our platforms
| become so large that it is difficult to build once/deploy many
| with certainty?". There again, I feel, is a much deeper and more
| interesting question. This too can be answered simply - avoid
| complexity and choose simpler languages/platforms that accomplish
| your goals, learn their surface area, and do your work. But, this
| might be more difficult/non-obvious to those just getting started
| - and there some good work could be done to make it more
| accessible.
|
| And here we look to things, for example, like WASM - trying to
| build simple primitives that can work on nearly any platform,
| upon which many complex languages can live - engineering
| solutions to attempt at reducing complexity based on variability
| and diversity of platforms and implementations.
|
| This question... surely relevant during this time of resurgence
| of "low/no-code" platforms and in relation to what we might have
| once thought of as "4GL" (or beyond) programming languages and
| related implementations/platforms.
| hacktember wrote:
| If I really need that capability, I personally would download a
| LAMP/WAMP/MAMP setup with all the docs downloaded but needing to
| Google things isn't inherently bad.
| paxys wrote:
| I used to program with 6 thick reference books around me. Has
| memorizing SDKs, APIs, libraries ever been a thing? Or is this
| just the daily "everything is bad nowadays" post?
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| Getting a simple application up and running shouldn't be that
| difficult without scouring reference guides if it is a thing
| you do.
|
| The number of times I google how to do the thing I'm supposed
| to do is relatively low, but the number of times I have to
| google how to fix something that has come up AFTER I did the
| thing I was doing is probably 90+% of my googling.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Back in the days of PHP, I could develop web apps without
| references for the most part, using a simple text editor. It's
| a pretty similar story with Python too, unless I'm using
| Pandas, I generally don't use reference material much.
|
| Today with node/angular, I'm generally leaning on Google (well
| DDG) pretty heavily throughout the day. Web platforms seem
| substantially more complicated today than they used to be. Then
| again, maybe the mid-aughts was the golden age of programming.
| rzzzt wrote:
| I read Python and PHP's offline .CHM files, and was quite
| happy with the level of information contained there.
| t8e56vd4ih wrote:
| you name it ... looking something up in a book takes much more
| effort than just googling. that's why there was a stronger
| incentive to memorize.
| strictnein wrote:
| Yeah, I was just thinking of how every developers cube used to
| have stacks of books and binders of CDs from MSDN.
| azhenley wrote:
| Every interview I've done required me to have everything
| memorized, so it seems this is _very_ much a thing.
| tutfbhuf wrote:
| But then it's rather a problem with the interview itself.
| bennyp101 wrote:
| I had an online interview last year, and it was basically me
| coding up as they supplied the criteria (in PHP). For the
| life of me, I couldn't remember how to use array_column, but
| I knew that was what I needed to use.
|
| They basically said "errr, you could just look it up?" -
| like, it was obvious that the interview was more about what
| you knew, and how to do things, rather than can you remember
| every little thing from ever about your job that you don't
| use day in day out.
| kube-system wrote:
| Think about the days before the internet. Was there any
| technical profession where you'd find offices without lots of
| books?
| swiley wrote:
| Does looking at old code I've written and have locally count?
|
| What about offline documentation like help() in python?
|
| Without either of those it would be iffy. I could probably do
| something that updates data consistantly but using a serious
| database or doing authentication correctly might be a stretch.
| HDMI_Cable wrote:
| I'm guessing you could use a .pdf reference manual for a specific
| language instead of googling, but it does feel like frameworks
| and workflows have gotten more complex overtime.
| danaliv wrote:
| I don't think I've ever been able to write software without an
| API reference, and I've been at it since the (late) 1980s. I
| guess it depends on what you're Googling. Sometimes I can work
| out a way to do something, but what I really want is the
| _idiomatic_ way to do it. No way to get there but to look it up.
| Or I need to know some specific fiddly bit about how a function
| behaves. That 's a reference lookup. If I'm Googling "how to
| reverse a linked list" ;-(, well, that's maybe not so great.
| whoisjuan wrote:
| I can't and I don't care. I consider my programming skills to be
| 100% based on my ability to know what to search for and not
| necessarily on my ability to remember trivial things like the
| exact sequence of things needed to initialize a framework or
| whatever.
|
| What I care about is having good foundations that help me to
| undestand what exactly I need to look for and that's by itself
| and invaluable skill.
| sosodev wrote:
| Does it actually matter if I can? Is using reference material a
| bad thing?
|
| Edit: I know the article touches on that idea briefly but my
| argument would be "of course it doesn't matter".
|
| Sure, I _could_ develop slightly faster with a more encyclopedic
| memory but I really doubt it would make an observable difference
| in the long-term.
|
| Most of my time isn't spent referencing libraries or syntax but
| instead I spend most of my time thinking out the logic and higher
| level relationships of my code. I suspect that is largely the
| case of any development even remotely non-trivial.
| mch82 wrote:
| You are 100% right. Of course it doesn't matter.
|
| > Does an over-reliance on documentation indicate a lack of
| critical expertise that will ultimately result in considerably
| lower job performance?
|
| Technical research is a skill. I love working with teammates
| who understand how to find, evaluate, and apply proven
| solutions. Most projects can spare the time to do a reuse trade
| study before writing something from scratch.
|
| Use (and authoring) of documentation is also a skill.
| Professionals use documentation to communicate with teammates
| so projects can scale efficiently.
| [deleted]
| warkdarrior wrote:
| It matters because SWE interviews rely on coding without
| googling. Maybe we need to change how interviews are done to
| test people on their Googling skills. For a given coding task,
| what do they search for? Do they Google for the right terms? Do
| they converge quickly on the right website to copy from?
| spideymans wrote:
| A measure of a good developer is how they choose and utilize
| tools. I really don't see the benefit of prohibiting
| developers from using tools that they'd otherwise have
| complete assess to on the job
| deeeeplearning wrote:
| Or just give them free reign to use whatever tools they would
| use in an actual work environment and see what the end
| results are. Sure makes more sense than seeing how many
| leetcode problems you memorized.
| slg wrote:
| >It matters because SWE interviews rely on coding without
| googling.
|
| Some (probably most) SWE interviews rely on coding without
| Googling. However I have been through plenty of interviews in
| which that wasn't the case. Coincidentally I also find this
| type of honesty in the interview process is a good indicator
| of how much I would enjoy working at the company.
| kortilla wrote:
| SWE interviews (at FAANGs at least) don't care about library
| specifics though. As long as you know the syntax and how to
| write algos/data structures, you can make it through.
|
| There is a strong argument that being good at that isn't
| required for most SWEs (including at FAANG), but it is
| something that having library/framework references doesn't
| really help with.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > There is a strong argument that being good at that isn't
| required for most SWEs (including at FAANG)
|
| Algos/data structures are used as a proxy for problem
| solving and how fast someone can learn. Plus every decent
| CS program will have a few courses on it.
|
| Also, internal codebases are, well, internal. You won't get
| a nicely formatted Stack Overflow response on how X works
| if X is deep in the Google Source tree.
| phkahler wrote:
| Let's say Elon starts that colony on Mars and you think "Ima
| move there and write code for a living." You might have the
| internet, but its 15 minutes each direction. Nothing
| interactive works, and while they brought copies of Wikipedia,
| stack overflow didnt package so easily.
|
| Or more simply, can you write a web app without internet
| access?
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Do we not have a cached version of the web on the Mars
| colony?
| rzzzt wrote:
| You can cache documentation locally: https://devdocs.io/
| tutfbhuf wrote:
| > stack overflow didnt package so easily
|
| You just need some copy of something like: the way back
| machine, google cache or archive.is and then do asynchronous
| mirroring and you are not so far behind.
|
| Zoom meetings might be a problem though.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > Zoom meetings might be a problem though.
|
| If it prompted the meeting organiser to put their one point
| into an email, thereby saving 6 people a 45 minute meeting,
| would it be a problem or a feature?
| tutfbhuf wrote:
| Would be an interesting case study to find out if remote
| developers from Mars are actually more productive due to
| lack of synchronous communication.
| jeegsy wrote:
| I think you might be missing the point of the hypothetical
| megous wrote:
| That would be a colony on The Sun.
| twox2 wrote:
| What use is a web app without internet access?
|
| Also, as if no internet access = no refernce.
| yosamino wrote:
| > Or more simply, can you write a web app without internet
| access?
|
| I understand what you are trying to say - but what would be
| the point of that ?
|
| If we were to prepare an essential list of documents that are
| required to write web applications without access to the net,
| we would probably be able to cobble it together and make it
| available offline.
|
| I mean MDN, CanIuse and CssTricks.com would already get you
| like 90% there.
| martijnvds wrote:
| Add the RFC library for fallback/server side of things.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| Elon would take care of it : Tesla Code X(c) - whether you
| are underwater,on the moon or Mars, we got you covered with
| Reddit, HN, Stack Overflow dumps in an easy searchable
| database. Add-ons for PornHub are available separately.
| akiselev wrote:
| Vast majority of documentation and even the websites
| promoting most web related libraries are autogenerated from
| git. Run a bash script with a bunch of `git clone` on an
| Earth based server and and ship the disk image, latency be
| damned.
|
| Dash [1] does package up StackOverflow and a bunch of library
| docs too.
|
| [1] https://kapeli.com/dash
| jjk166 wrote:
| And what if you wanted to go camping on the ocean floor? Can
| you start a camp fire underwater?
|
| That you can imagine some convoluted scenario where a skill
| could be employed does not mean it is an efficient use of
| your time to develop that skill, particularly when that
| scenario is easily avoidable.
| scubbo wrote:
| Well said.
| yarcob wrote:
| It's not a problem when you look up the spelling or the order
| of arguments in the reference.
|
| It's a problem when you search for the solution to every
| problem with a search engine.
|
| So many answers on the internet are written by absolute
| beginners, who happened to have the same problem, and then
| blogged about the solution after spending 5 minutes of
| googling. Sometimes these answers are alright, but often they
| are shallow and miss context.
|
| The problem is excacerbated by the fact that 1000s of sites try
| to get into the top results for programming questions. So you
| end up with crappy shallow answers, and never learn the
| underlying details.
|
| And then there's the problem that the more experienced you get,
| the less you look up answers, so the less you are exposed to
| sites like Stack Overflow, and the less you contribute to Stack
| Overflow. So the result is that the least experienced
| contribute most to the answers on the web.
|
| My preferred solution is to buy books. Find the best book on
| your topic and read a chapter, and you'll learn more than if
| you had googled 100 questions.
|
| The downside of books is that it only works for "old" tech. If
| you want to learn about the hot new Swift UI Declarative
| Reactive Whatever, your out of luck and you need to scrape
| together any info you can find from random blog posts...
| onion2k wrote:
| _My preferred solution is to buy books. Find the best book on
| your topic and read a chapter, and you 'll learn more than if
| you had googled 100 questions._
|
| Books are also written by amateurs a lot of the time,
| especially if the topic is a bit niche. I've had people from
| publishers reach out to me to write a book about things based
| on a single blog post in the past.
| allie1 wrote:
| Doesn't make books bad. It still requires someone sitting
| down to organize his/her thoughts and do the research.
| dbcurtis wrote:
| In the pre-web days I had a shelf full of O'Reilly books.
| Everyone did. But O'Reilly has gone down hill, and the
| popular tools have good on-line doc that is much fresher
| than a book can ever be.
|
| Technical books have become a dumpster fire. Some
| publishers (I'm looking at you Packt) are so bad their
| books are not worth the space they take in a dumpster.
| Total waste of trees.
| mywittyname wrote:
| I mostly agree, but I think there are situations where it does
| make a difference.
|
| I had a position working on a pretty complicated 3d application
| in Angular. At times, it felt like I was fighting a war on two
| fronts, one dealing with Angular complexities and the other
| dealing with domain complexities. A better understanding of
| Angular in general would have greatly increased my
| productivity.
|
| Now, whether or not an increase in team productivity would have
| really mattered is hard to gauge.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| That's the reason I do algorithmic whiteboard instead of full
| blown "real world" coding exercises.
|
| I don't care that someone memorized whatever command line
| syntax to create a new project in whatever framework. That's
| just rote. Even what we write on the whiteboard I don't expect
| it to compile. Is it ToString or toString? Can't recall either.
|
| What I care about is that someone can ask the relevant
| questions, come up with a design and explain what and why they
| are doing something.
| lvncelot wrote:
| Last interview I had, I was encouraged to google and
| afterwards, we talked about the resources I sought out and
| how I used that information. It was a good experience - if
| it's a part of my job, why not make it a part of the
| interview?
| _the_inflator wrote:
| And afterwards? What is the hired guy then doing? Fixing the
| size of a button? ;)
| munk-a wrote:
| That really depends on how much management there is for
| hand holding. I expect a good developer to get a ticket to
| fix the size of a button and be able to follow up with
| stakeholders about the size of the button next to it.
|
| It'd be really weird if we sunk so much effort into ticket
| writing that everything really was just reduced to a task -
| at that point the ticket author should just go ahead and
| fix the thing.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| A dedicated ticket to go fix a button. That's a symptom
| of a pretty dysfunctional org.
|
| If my requirements are that precise I'll farm that to
| offshored contractors.
| ganafagol wrote:
| I never thought that there is a benefit to working at a shop that
| is using an obscure, poorly documenyed in-house language. Since
| most of it is in conventions and institutionalized knowledge, the
| "core" of it that we actually use/type on a day-to-day basis is
| so small that it fits into everybody's mind, and it's getting
| constantly refreshed as well. No temptation to google anything,
| there wouldn't be answers anyway. And our in-house stackoverflow
| clone died from not being used years ago.
|
| Wow this sounds terrible. But it's actually an awesome place to
| work at!
| olenin wrote:
| I couldn't either. No doubt many could. But that's not the point.
| What a wonderfully posed question with such broad relevance,
| especially for Australians ATM vis a vis the government's current
| attempted tussle with the omniscient platform. Please let this
| discussion grow. This is just a thank you message. Cheers!
| olenin wrote:
| P.S. as evidence of my incompetence I couldn't even operate the
| comments function correctly and posted twice ;)
| exabrial wrote:
| I mean, using a maven archetype, I sure can get a Hello, World
| going in about 30s.
| abeppu wrote:
| This specific case, and the norm of interviewing without access
| to references is not that interesting.
|
| But it is kinda like a specialized version of a fun party
| question, "With what you know now, if you were sent back in time,
| how far could you go and usefully employ your knowledge of the
| future?" (E.g. I know chemical fertilizer is a big deal, but I
| definitely do not know how to make it. I studied heat engines in
| a physics class, but could not spark the industrial revolution a
| century earlier.)
|
| Maybe the midway point between these is something like, "if you
| were sent back to an earlier era in computing, how far back could
| you go while usefully applying your current knowledge?" E.g. I
| work with the jvm constantly and I know that it was a big deal
| for a popular language to have an actually described memory
| model, but I couldn't build it myself in the 80s. Maybe I could
| build MapReduce or Spark in the 90s?
|
| It's _hard_ working without the informational resources you're
| used to, but there are so many more fun ways to explore that
| gradient than web apps.
| Olreich wrote:
| The going back in time question is actually really good. What
| are the fundamental concepts you need to kickstart stuff? Those
| fundamental insights are still going to be relevant today,
| which is why they sparked revolutions and major changes to the
| landscape.
| abeppu wrote:
| A close parallel, which I refuse to play until the world
| becomes a less scary place is about rebuilding after an
| apocalypse.
|
| One "out" that can make the exercise more inclusive depending
| on the group is germ theory. Any modern person could save a
| bunch of lives in almost any period if they can convince
| people to wash their hands, boil suspect water, separate
| wells and sewage by a wide margin, etc. And yes, definitely
| still relevant today.
| racl101 wrote:
| Depends.
|
| Are you asking if I can make a web app from memory? Probably not.
|
| I have ebooks, I have my Dash app which downloads documentation.
|
| So while, I could technically do it without Googling, I can't do
| it without documentation. If I can't Google then I'd have to look
| at documentation and my ebooks.
|
| Why?
|
| Well, I work with a lot of languages and frameworks. I can't
| commit all these technologies to memory.
|
| Few could.
| noisem4ker wrote:
| Yes, I definitely could do it without Googling(TM). There's
| plenty of search engines and little need to advertise one in
| particular by coining a word just for it.
|
| Sorry about the snark and completely missing the point of the
| article.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Yeah, the googling point is kind of strange in that way.
|
| My first thought was, OK I'd probably go back to some projects
| in my bookmarks db that seemed interesting last time I was
| looking into web apps. HTMX maybe. That project has some good
| examples in the docs.
|
| Googling can help in some ways, but it's also casting way too
| wide a net in others, especially if you keep repeating that
| step. It's like walking out into the street and shouting, "I
| WANT TO BUILD AN APP" infrequently, and then wondering why you
| keep doing this instead of building apps.
|
| Perhaps it would help the author to think more about creating
| their own process for selecting, refining, and testing
| methodologies first, then ramp up to building an app second.
| stereolambda wrote:
| It's something that I'm mildly interested in because 1) finding
| the same thing on the Internet again is not always easy (the
| answer can be buried somewhere in the search results, the site
| rankings change)[1], 2) going to the web browser can be
| distracting, 3) there are the odd situations when you don't have
| Internet connection.
|
| So here's my attempts. I store some annotated snippets in Joplin
| (could probably use org-mode or similar). I also collect
| programming ebooks and PDF'ed docs: sometimes you can still find
| them, sometimes you can 'print to PDF'. No idea how one would do
| it with javadoc for example.
|
| The problem is interface for searching this stuff locally and
| reading. I use recoll for full text search and qpdfview for PDF
| viewing (the main reason is that it has tabs). Admittedly, this
| is not completely satisfying. Simple text search doesn't have the
| sophistication, PDF's feel less pleasant than web pages. Maybe
| something I could get used to if I went fully that route, but for
| now I don't feel compelled to do that (besides some
| experimentation).
|
| My guess is that _if_ you use a small language /libraries, or
| have a self-contained codebase, or do fairly rote things, it's
| possible to go without searching documentation. Otherwise... no?
|
| [1] Or you could use bookmarks, but then, why not archive.
| jkingsbery wrote:
| I probably could at some point. It's pretty easy: you do the
| right commands to generate a Java project from a maven archetype
| or to start a Rails project, you hook up your git repo to Heroku,
| tweak some HTML. Today if I wanted to, I could memorize the
| sequences to stick some node.js inside of an AWS Lambda.
|
| There are at least a few problems with this: 1. I don't have to
| create a basic web app frequently, so I've forgotten the
| commands. They're easy to find with googling. It's not worth my
| time to memorize them. (When I was learning to program in the
| 90's my family didn't have Internet access yet, but if you
| replace "google" with "looking through helpfiles or programming
| books," you get the same effect.)
|
| 2. The kinds of webapps professional software engineers build
| generally aren't "basic." Webapps at the professional level are
| complicated. Rather than "an over-reliance on documentation
| indicate a lack of critical expertise that will ultimately result
| in considerably lower job performance," reliance on documentation
| seems to be more about having more tools at our hands to build
| software that's more maintainable in the long run. We have
| frameworks/services that handle payments, security, storing data,
| and so on for us. The trade-off for delegating to others solving
| ancillary problems for you is that you have to read their
| documentation.
|
| 3. More and more in my career, I find myself not just googling
| technology but to try to understand business domains. Our job
| isn't to tell our boss "Here's a webapp!" Our job is to solve a
| customer need, and that involves understanding who the customer
| is. Could I shovel some code out the door without googling around
| for something? Maybe, but it probably wouldn't be very good.
|
| 4. All else being equal, I'd rather work with an engineer who is
| good at finding information quickly rather than someone who
| insists on figuring it out. Google is not some magic mind reader
| - you have to know the names of some of the things your trying to
| do, you have to assess the likelihood of an approach is worth
| trying, and even if you do get an answer from Google, you'll
| inevitably need to adapt it in some way to meet your need.
| Sometimes, it's not enough to look it up in Google, you have to
| reach out to other people, and you need to know how to formulate
| your question to help others help you. There is skill involved in
| finding information.
|
| 5. I look up things that I already know all the time. Just
| because you know something, that doesn't mean you shouldn't
| double check that you know it as well as you think, or that there
| isn't some better answer or solution. For one example within
| programming, I'll look up articles I read 6 years ago that do a
| good job of explaining an idea to someone before I give feedback
| on a code review and I have to explain a similar idea.
|
| So, engineers don't just memorize stuff for the sake of it.
| Anyone reading this article shouldn't feel like they're not a
| real engineer because they can't do what the author suggested.
| jwlake wrote:
| The corollary to this is can you write a simple c program without
| a compiler and have it do the right thing and compile without
| syntax errors the first time.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I think I'd be able to do this, especially from my desktop where
| I have the code for many basic web apps to look at if I need to
| (which feels a bit like cheating). I am also not a professional
| web developer but I make random websites sometimes for fun.
| refactor_master wrote:
| And even if you could, you're probably using a framework that
| does too much, and that's cheating.
|
| Or was this a criticism about Google and the internet all along?
|
| Wait, what was the point again?
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| I doubt most developers can do this. Especially if it involves
| all the configuration needed to deploy the site. I don't think
| they need to anyways. Most development involves a small amount of
| custom application logic and a large amount of hooking things
| together and manipulating data into the right format. Any
| programming of this sort requires lots of documentation checking
| to make sure everything is integrated properly.
| burlesona wrote:
| Yes. It's not that hard, so long as your definition of "basic web
| app" is server rendered HTML and CSS. I could certainly do that
| from scratch in Ruby without Google. If I didn't have Google I
| wouldn't want to use Rails - even though I know the framework
| well, there's a lot there to remember.
|
| But I would expect anyone who is (a) proficient with a high level
| programming language and (b) has ever built a web app from
| scratch would be able to say yes to this as well, so long as they
| get to work in the language they know well.
|
| The author of this post specifically does not fit this criteria:
|
| > To be fair, I'm not a web developer so I'm not entirely shocked
| by this. I only have the itch (and time) to throw together a
| small web app about once every 6 months.
|
| Also, JS is part of the problem. Even avoiding the chaotic world
| of front-end by assuming strict SSR using something like Express,
| Node would be one of the more difficult ecosystems build in from
| memory, because JS doesn't have the level of standard library
| that most languages do, because it changes so fast, and because
| it's drunk the micro package kool-aid so hard (aka left_pad).
|
| But for developers fluent in Ruby, Python, Go, Java, PHP, and
| probably several others, I would think this is a very realistic
| ask.
| indymike wrote:
| Most of the time, we're not starting a project, so making a basic
| web app isn't something most of us do often. That said, there's
| still an over-reliance on google and the web. A better test would
| be: can you close tickets in your current project without
| googling?
| Animats wrote:
| There are books. But the O'Reilly guides aren't keeping up.[1]
| The market is dead.
|
| [1]
| https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/96192.O_Reilly_s_Pocket_...
| trey-jones wrote:
| Well there is this quote, often attributed to Einstein himself:
| "Never memorize something that you can look up."
|
| I don't know whether he really said or thought anything like
| that, and I also don't actually agree with the literal meaning.
| There are some things that it pays to memorize, in my opinion. As
| I keep reminding my daughters: times tables (or math facts as
| they seem to be known nowadays) are important forever.
|
| The principal behind the quote, however, I'm fully behind. I live
| in the docs. Even if it's something that I know pretty well, I
| often like to check to make sure I understand exactly what's
| going down. There are too many little details that are easy to
| forget. If it's important and you aren't sure, look it up!
|
| Finally, I could probably claim to be able to write build a
| simple web app without using google, but I'm sure I would lean
| heavily on my editor to remind me of argument order, syntax, etc.
| Maybe there is a little bit of difference there: if my editor/IDE
| can tell me what I need to know, it's probably just that bit
| faster than searching for it in a browser.
|
| Shoutout to lsp-mode.
| burlesona wrote:
| There is some truth to that quote, namely that becoming
| effective at looking things up is a big productivity booster.
|
| But there is no productivity booster as large as knowing
| exactly how to do something without needing to look it up. This
| is almost by definition the level of mastery that comes from
| significant practice / experience.
|
| I've noticed that some of the very smart people I've worked
| with for years did not ever really achieve mastery of their
| language or tools, and I think that's at least partially
| because they didn't care to take the time to try and figure
| things out without looking them up, and thus the inner workings
| of things remained inscrutable to them.
| rsync wrote:
| Yes, I can and I have done it before, under time pressure.
|
| I was one of the original employees of k12.com, working as a
| Sun/Solaris sysadmin and late one night the "web team" had a
| next-day deadline to make a registration system work.
|
| There were press releases and print materials being released the
| next morning with addresses and registration forms that needed to
| work and their big bloated "stack" was not producing anything
| workable for any of them.
|
| I ftp'd over an old, personal copy of cgi-lib.pl and hacked up a
| little web page that dumped to a flat file and cc'd an email
| address with every registration.
|
| It took about 45 minutes and _they used it for a year_.
| Arainach wrote:
| In my opinion, there's a difference between having to go to the
| docs _once_ and having to go to the docs (or example code) _every
| time_.
|
| I am not a (frontend) web developer by career. I did LAMP webdev
| work as a college job 12+ years ago and, like the author of this
| article, do small personal web projects perhaps once or twice a
| year. I did one of them earlier this week.
|
| Yes, I went to Google for basic things like "Javascript map
| lambda" or even "Javascript foreach syntax", but I refreshed
| myself on those exactly once and was then able to keep it in my
| short term memory through the completion of the project a few
| days later. I switch around so many similar-but-not-identical
| languages (Java, Go, Python, C++, etc.) in a year that it's often
| not worth it for me to memorize the minutae of each one. I know
| how to conceptually do something in whatever language, and use
| search engines and stack overflow to remind myself where to put
| the semicolons and the brackets.
| ape4 wrote:
| The web is recursive. You can only make the web without the web.
| lostgame wrote:
| Yes. I'm a mobile and web developer of 15+ years and I often will
| just hit File->New in Dreamweaver and proceed to create the JS,
| CSS, PHP; etc, on its own while prototyping quite often without
| the need to use anything but my own head.
|
| Granted, that knowledge came from, originally, reading a _ton_ of
| books, which; as the Internet can be much, much more up-to-date
| with ever-changing APIs and technologies, I am happy to have as a
| replacement to heavy and quickly out-of-date books - and also
| came from 15 or so years of practice.
|
| YMMV.
| jcims wrote:
| I think one of the questions beneath the question is how much
| would you be able to justify paying each month for a
| subscription-only Google? How about Internet access?
| lbj wrote:
| What an odd piece. Who would expect a non-web-dev to develop a
| webapp without using google?
|
| I do a lot of webdevelopment and have zero issues.
| hackernews wrote:
| One of my fondest memories programming was on a sailboat crossing
| the ocean.
|
| When ever I hit doldrums, I'd pull out the laptop and work on the
| app to pass time. Luckily I had a good collection of gems locally
| that I used for reference.
|
| Wasn't a web app, but I'm quite proud of it.
| FriedrichN wrote:
| Yes I can, but I won't. Because I'm not insane.
|
| I know for a lot of people coding is all about fun and lifestyle,
| but at some point it becomes a job and you just need to get shit
| done without being fancy, cool, hardcore, eXtreme, 1337, agile,
| lean, mean, whatever.
|
| Or maybe I'm just becoming grumpy and old.
| cat199 wrote:
| $ ed ~/public_html/cgi-bin/basic-web-app.cgi #!
| /usr/bin/env perl ...
| f430 wrote:
| Of course not because any written software is the result of
| learning and we simply cannot learn every permutations that can
| be called a "web app".
|
| If we are talking about deploying something using framework which
| automatically generates CRUD boilerplate then perhaps yes.
| csharpminor wrote:
| I definitely cannot do this, but the tool that gets me close is
| using backsearch to find old terminal commands. This might sound
| really basic, but I have worked with surprisingly tenured devs
| who jaw drop when I show them backsearch (yes, really).
|
| I'm personally a fan of fzf. ctrl-r has saved me many google
| searches. If you're just getting into software development it's a
| lifesaver.
| mattlondon wrote:
| There is a difference between "how do I do this?" And "how do I
| _do_ this? "
|
| I know without even thinking precisely how I would assemble a
| simple web app - I do not need help to understand what needs to
| be done in turns of building blocks. I.e. architecture, how it
| all hangs together, how data is stored and transmitted etc.
|
| But do I need to search specific arguments for a library function
| call, some DSL syntax, or other reference material? You bet I do
| - time is too short to memorise that sort of thing, and totally
| not worth it IMO (especially since tech moves fast - what is
| relevant today, is obsolete and dead next year)
| eikenberry wrote:
| Title is misleading as they wanted to do it without any online
| resources, including online documentation. Using docs is a lot
| different from googling. I'm not surprised at all that they
| couldn't do it without documentation. I would have been a bit
| surprised if they couldn't do it just without google/SO, though I
| would have blamed that more on poor documentation.
| lostmsu wrote:
| Totally not a problem in the world of .NET + Visual Studio.
|
| Create new project -> web site -> you get a template filled in
| with auth and minimal database.
|
| No need to google function arguments, because in statically typed
| language autocomplete provides nearly 100% discovery.
|
| CI style deployment would be a problem, but manually you can
| deploy from the project menu.
| bennyp101 wrote:
| I guess that depends on what an 'app' is.
|
| Can I knock up a site with some PHP/HTML/CSS without references -
| sure.
|
| Can I knock up a standard server side app - sure, but I'm gonna
| want to look up certain functions and what arguments they take.
|
| Can I put together an SPA without? Probably not. I know what I
| need to do, but I'm not going to remember which packages I need
| to install, or how they are configured, or if package x works
| with webpack4 or if I have to have Vue2 because a certain thing I
| want to use doesn't support 3 yet etc.
|
| There are so many moving parts now for an 'app' that it is not
| feasible to keep it all in your head. Thats why there are so many
| starter-packages for things, because people forget what they did
| the first time around, so just create a new git repo with the
| skeleton to get going again ... only to be replaced in 6 months.
|
| It was perl and flat file site counters when I started, and now I
| have to google how to make webpack work nicely :D
| number6 wrote:
| Yeah I guess I can crank out a basic CRUD-App without looking
| up anything. All depending on what app means. If I have to work
| with new technologies I clearly look up the best practices and
| different solutions to common problems but on my hometurf? I
| look into the source code to know my way around. It's quicker
| most of the time. Or I ask in the forums - is this allowed?
| johnsonjo wrote:
| I could do it, but I would likely have to have access to Dash [1]
| which is actually quite useful when you're on the go. I am a
| proud purchaser of Dash (though not at all affiliated with them),
| because it comes in handy when I'm somewhere with little to no
| internet.
|
| [1]: https://kapeli.com/dash
| jmuguy wrote:
| Most of my googling is just for API and SDK references. So, yes,
| with something like Dash or another offline reference.
| madhadron wrote:
| So the crucial thing for me would be: are the reference docs for
| may language/library/OS considered external resources? Can I type
| man in a terminal? Can I use a Python repl to explore the data
| structures? If so, then, yes, I can. But I had to go double tab
| on http.server to remember what was in there.
|
| I used to commute on a ferry, and was offline for that commute.
| Often I would do some coding (more often I was writing), and a
| tool like Dash that put reference docs offline was essential.
| csours wrote:
| I tried to make a one file java console app the other day. I know
| I did this in college. I gave up and just did the task in a
| python notebook.
| andersco wrote:
| The meaning of and technology needed to build a "basic web app"
| is in a continual state of evolution. Therefore, googling is not
| so much required due to a lack of knowledge but rather due to
| that this knowledge needs to be continually kept up to date.
| stakkur wrote:
| 'Before Google', it seemed to go something like this:
|
| * Ask coworkers
|
| * Look at documentation
|
| * Try things out
|
| Things don't seem way different today; we've just replaced the
| first two items with a search engine.
|
| There is _one_ difference I 've noticed, though: an instant-
| access search engine makes it easier to 'fake' your way through
| something with less skill and knowledge. In the long run, this
| seems detrimental to professional growth and development.
| gabereiser wrote:
| Before google it was exactly like that. When I was younger and
| junior and eager to build whatever my boss wanted, coworkers
| would rely on each other for figuring things out. No fear of
| being labeled "incompetent", "unskilled", or "underperforming".
| It was more team oriented.
|
| Trying to reverse-engineer some crazy DHTML javascript
| algorithm used by one site so we can reproduce it in ours (for
| their members portal).
|
| Coworker came to me asking if I could help her deconstruct the
| hair ball javascript code into something meaningful. It used
| variable names like "a, z, t1" etc.
|
| While you can quickly google something and get back a barrage
| of answers, usually on the same solution, this is software we
| are talking about - there isn't a _One True Way_ and there
| never will be. The more we try to make a "right way to do
| things" we invent a new way.
|
| Do I google when coding, sometimes. Do I need to? No. Does it
| make me faster to put my thinking cap on the wall and just go
| with #1 SO answer? Unfortunately yes.
| megous wrote:
| I used to take work with me to places without the internet. You
| just need some local reference docs and a few years of
| experience.
| [deleted]
| ceedan wrote:
| Only if you let me use another search engine ;)
| egfx wrote:
| Yes I can and I did after the enyojs framework went completely
| bye-bye and replaced with an entirely different framework called
| enact based not on enyo but on react! It reminded me of the time
| Qualcomm decided to one day purge all brew documents from their
| website. Google is fickle. The truth is in the source code of
| whatever you're working with.
| core-questions wrote:
| > To be fair, I'm not a web developer
|
| Kind of a non-article. Could I make an outdoor irrigation system,
| fix my head gasket, or anything else complicated without doing
| some research?
| azhenley wrote:
| Author here. I'm a professor that teaches software engineering
| and occasionally web development, sooo I think your comparison
| is inapt...
| core-questions wrote:
| So in my metaphor, that would be like perhaps a gardener
| assembling irrigation, or someone in a mechanical trade
| fixing the gasket. There's still a ton of specific knowledge
| to the job in question.
|
| Of course, it shouldn't be that Google specifically is
| necessary - just some literature or reference source (i.e.
| consulting with someone).
| resonantjacket5 wrote:
| I am wondering are you using some external framework
| angular/react or just "only" js?
|
| "Or even deeper, does an over-reliance on documentation
| indicate a lack of critical expertise that will ultimately
| result in considerably lower job performance?"
|
| I don't think so, and I don't know why relying on
| documentation would be bad.
|
| In a more general sense even for making a todo list app I'd
| imagine the fundamentals aren't changed even across
| frameworks e.g. of when adding a todo it needs to be added to
| some sort of a list.
| auslegung wrote:
| The rest of the quote is quite relevant.
|
| > To be fair, I'm not a web developer so I'm not entirely
| shocked by this. I only have the itch (and time) to throw
| together a small web app about once every 6 months.
|
| A better rebuttal is, do you make a [small] outdoor irrigation
| system or fix a [simple] head gasket "once every 6 months"? I
| added the adjectives to better compare to his stated "small web
| app".
|
| I think it's reasonable to expect someone who "throw[s]
| together a small web app about once every 6 months" to be able
| to do it without googling, but it isn't how software
| development is taught. When studying something to master it you
| start with the basics and do them over and over until you
| understand them. We don't (tend to) do that in software
| development, I think for two primary reasons: 1) there's more
| "important, urgent" things to do and 2) things change so
| quickly that probably half of what you learn today will be
| unused in a year (of course if you learn the very basics those
| rarely change, but I'm talking about the things we all know
| change so frequently, but were good decisions at the time)
| plesiv wrote:
| Easy... mkdir example-1 cd example-1
| yarn init -y yarn add next react react-dom mkdir
| pages cat <<EOF > pages/index.js const Page = () =>
| "Hello world!"; export default Page; EOF yarn
| dev
|
| Didn't test. There could be typos and you need to care about the
| indentation of the HEREDOC.
|
| I can't do it with an arbitrary set of tools either, but that's
| why good tools matter and that's why you should use Next.js.
| omarhaneef wrote:
| I remember one of my physics teachers told me that what it used
| to mean to be a good mathematician was you could do mathematics
| quickly in your head.
|
| But then cheap and ubiquitous calculators changed all that, and
| what it meant to be a good mathematician was solving complex
| chains of problems.
|
| But then cheap computers changed that, and what it means to be a
| good mathematician now was just setting up the right equation.
| jascii wrote:
| Yes I can.
|
| I regularly disconnect for a hacking session, reduces
| distractions and I find it often helps me come up with simpler
| solutions then building something up out of what's already there.
|
| Its also nice to spend some time on my boat and still get some
| work done :)
| gabereiser wrote:
| I was going to post something along the same lines. I know my
| framework, I know my code, and I absolutely can create a web
| app offline without using google.
|
| I also enjoy boats and working from them from time to time.
|
| A lot of people missed the fact that good intellisense style
| code completion, local docs (rdoc, what have you) are still
| viable. Also having some PDF's on your machine of programming
| books helps you not google for solutions.
| matt7340 wrote:
| It obviously doesn't matter that much if you can or can't. We all
| google all day long.
|
| But through my career at various times I've been able to say yes,
| usually after spending multiple years on a project and the
| platform/tech its built with.
|
| Speaks to the really enjoyable side effect of productivity and
| unencumbered expressiveness that comes with being immersed in a
| platform or technology for a longer period or time.
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