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Comment by colecut | Hacker News Reader

I remain living happily in the old days of PHP, somehow making functioning applications and being paid well. Life is easy and good.

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My last interview: the interviewers said I was the only candidate who didn't Google any syntax or articles after being given a small 60 min development task from scratch. I was applying for a senior dev role and if I couldn't deliver a tiny web app, I wouldn't hire me either. I could have just solved the task procedurally but I asked if they wanted to see a more OO solution to demo a bit more knowledge. I think back to that time and think how poor my env/tooling was back 5 years ago compared to today. I'm way more powerful now. Version control. Docker up an entire server architecture now with separated proxy, web, db server, env configs, & more. I routinely challenge myself to starting scratch projects to test myself because I rarely work on greenfield projects these days. When I encounter resistance in the workflow, I work to solve the roadblocks. I think this is an important dev exercise that brings alot of satisfaction. Constantly improve your tooling!

It’s impressive what you say, but I would hire someone that would need to google to develop something if they were to code it quickly enough and to code it well.

Especially for the initial spinning-up part, given how rarely that happens compared to ongoing work.

Personally I make no attempt to write code without googling. In my position as a robotics engineer my work covers such a breadth that I guess I just outsource my memory to Google. I don’t remember the syntax for many common Linux commands. I don’t remember how bash scripts work. I constantly look recommended ways of solving certain problems. Google is just integrated in to my process.

This applies to me as well. There are lots and lots of small things I do so rarely that I just can't keep the details in my memory. And I really would love to be able to type "man scp" and on the first lines of the man page to just get a couple of basic examples that I could basically copy-paste and change the server addresses to suit. But instead I get a ciphertext of all possible flags I can use, so in the end it is just faster to go directly to qwant.com and type "scp example"

Take a look at https://tldr.sh/.

http://cht.sh it does exactly that, also from command line.

https://tldr.sh/

It seems odd to practice things you rarely do.

I went one stint where I didn't start a new project for 5 years. Practicing new projects in that time period would have been a whole lot of wasted time.

To make you less fragile to disorder. The things you do regularly are trained into you by repetition. You practice under developped skills to stay flexible and able to adapt.

Very similar to physical fitness. Sitting all day trains you to sit. And that’s making you more fragile

If you don't do it, how can you know what's going on inside and how it works?

Do you need to know what's going on inside? Or can you trust a colleague who's responsible for that?

If you don't know what's going on inside, how can you claim to have an opinion about its reliability and suitability?

I don't think practicing how to spin up a hello world web app from zero is gonna be very good at teaching you how it works inside.

Most of the inner working is hidden

I think I would die from boredom if I had your job doing the same thing which I know how to do over and over again. Wouldn't you just automate something like that with a Factory in Java? Somehow my brain works the exact opposite if I already know how to do something without googling it then it's not interesting anymore and I move on to the next thing outside of my comfort zone.

The fuck?

I guess I know now why every other website pegs my CPU to 100% to slowly display static text and break the browser's back button - professional software engineers are "bored to death" when doing their job so they have to make things "interesting" in order to entertain themselves.

I have a fiancee, I have a 10 year old child, She has 9 and 7 year olds.

We live together, I work from home, they school from home.

I manage to not get bored.

Sounds wonderful. Is your company hiring?

Do you live in Europe?

San Diego, California

it's hilarious. people using ruby and python and wondering why they cant build web apps without copy pasting stuff off of stack overflow.

The question is not about stackoverflow, but googling in general. As in, without project documentation accessible.

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.

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.

they all do, its just that some are better than others. i dont actually like php, but it has plenty of advantages when it comes to quick web app development even without googling.

had a client once where its workers were day dreaming of a job in the valley and ofc they were using python. they bashed php on a daily basis, and as they were doing it, the php api was sole codebase running in production (essentially the company’s product) and running reliably for a few years.

the python workers were still struggling with basics such as queues and isc, and digging through non existent or vaguely written documentation. was a fun experience watching them struggle as i basically cloned repos, read the code or entry points for that code and get things shipped.

since then i started loving python. development is slower and my invoices keep coming. love it. occasionally i write some lib thats already been implemented in plenty of php and nodejs packages.

oh same client had a ruby codebase that kept failing and couldnt find devs to work on it. fun times.

The comment was about writing an app with no docs local or otherwise. That you hate python seems...irrelevant

> if its (sic!) 2021 and you still write code using vim and niche languages then you are doing it wrong

That's literally what I keep hearing since 30 years lol (for vi proper not vim, that is).

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