Comment by animex | Hacker News Reader

Comment by animex | Hacker News Reader

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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!

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"

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

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

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?

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

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?

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.

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