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Comment by MperorM | Hacker News Reader

This is a hard lesson I had to learn as a junior developer.

I'm impatient and Stack overflow can often give me an easy solution. But just as often, it can't and I will spend 30 minutes unproductively trying things with little progress.

As I become a better developer I become more inclined to spend 30 minutes with the documentation instead.

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When you're reading documentation, you also will notice other things in addition to solving your particular problem. Those other things might be helpful few minutes later and you will actually save that time. Or may be tomorrow, if your memory is good. Or may be you'll read those documentation and will actually find a better solution.

Of course most of interesting problems are not described in documentation.

Depends on how clear the documentation/usage is... and sometimes you accept that you have limited knowledge and understanding. Either way, it helps to understand what you are doing, and when in doubt look it up.

If the library documentation isn't clear then that's a clear sign that whoever created it doesn't take quality seriously and you shouldn't use it in the first place. Of course sometimes there's no alternative so you just have to deal with it.

I face a lot of anxiety from this. I'll have a task like setting up Point in Time Recovery for postgres, and I've spent days mostly just reading documentation - How postgres manages wal logs, how the internals of several popular solutions work etc.

I know it'll be worth it in the long run, but it feels like I'm wasting time because "I'm not doing anything" - I'm not committing any changes while my coworkers are busy adding new features.

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