Ask HN: How often do you Google for answers while coding? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How often do you Google for answers while coding?

16 pointsthewarrior15 comments

All the time. Many times per day. I've been programming for fifteen years, and I think my willingness to Google things has only gone up over that time. There are a lot more things that I know off the top of my head now than when I started, but I've got way less tolerance for wasting time trying to figure out weird problems when there's already an answer online.

15+ years here too, I have exactly the same situation. 90% of the things I worked on years ago, I wouldn't bother with now; I would just google. There's only so many times you can make a library to handle 'common stuff' :) Even though Google didn't exist back in 'the day', I would say I look up stuff more and more as time goes on - I always take a look at what's out there before making a decision to get coding.

As cliched as it is: The greater your experience, the more you know how little you know.

OT: Interestingly I just came across my first 'expert sex change .com' link in years a few days ago.. for some ugly and stupid legacy server error, naturally I swore at the site again, and told my colleagues about how much we 'hated on that' in the day.

Constantly. Even when I know exactly what to code I like to view alternative examples to see if there is a better way to do it. Even if I know my code is rock solid I like to also filter search results for the past year just to make sure there isn't a newer+better way to do something that used to be best.

For me, depends on the level of experience I have with the language/platform/library, ranging from once a month to a dozen times in a day.

I've about 7 years experience coding various software in Python (data intensive, web apps, network app, etc). Today when coding in Python I mostly go to the official Python and Django doc directly, that I have installed locally. I open it about 2 to 8 times a day (4-6 hours span) depending on how well I'm familiar with the library I'm dealing with.

For more general questions not covered in the doc I Google about twice to 4 times a day in average. I usually go to stackoverflow.com directly to search.

When coding HTML/CSS/Javascript I clearly lookup caniuse.com about 20 times a day to ensure consistent browser support and learn about corner cases.

A lot. Some of my searches from yesterday:

    suppress STDOUT print ruby backticks

    mechanize user agent alias list

    git gc garbage collect source

There is no shame in googling. While I would heavily recommend reading and learning documentation, once you get a passing familiarity (not memorize it) you at least understand what you are using and googling it simply can save time. If you need specifics on the implementation the docs will always be there.

There is a reason we have SO and google is so great at finding things on it. Have no shame :) It doesn't make you a poor programmer to be thinking things out enough you are googling alternatives, how the innards of something works, etc.

Obviously this is all just my opinion, though. I could be a moron and not know it.

> While I would heavily recommend reading and learning documentation, once you get a passing familiarity (not memorize it) you at least understand what you are using and googling it simply can save time. If you need specifics on the implementation the docs will always be there.

And these days, the docs are usually online, and usually don't have a great dedicated search engine, so often googling is the best way to find what you are looking for in the docs, anyway.

Honestly, I've been programming for almost 5 years now and been learning a whole lot of different technologies, languages, frameworks, etc. since I started so its safe to say I'm barely an intermediate in alot of things. Because 5 years isn't alot of time, I google answers quite often for different reasons. Most of the time, its to figure out how to code something up instead of trying to figure it out myself (I have a general idea how to do it) so that I can get stuff done. Frankly, I'm too lazy to make mistakes. This is pretty bad since I don't really understand why things go wrong most of the time.

For me recently, it's constant because I'm working with Spring Boot and ExtJS for the first time. So I'd say how often you're doing web searches is a function of your familiarity with the techs you're using.

I use google quite often for searching $LANGUAGE, $PLATFORM, $LIBRARY docs... it's so much faster than using the provided search.

For JavaScript and CSS it's a lot of googling. Mostly because they have no standards you can rely on.

For a language like Java, I mostly google to see if what I want to do already exists in an Apache library or is now part of the latest JRE. For well-documented Java frameworks which have JavaDocs attached, googling isn't often necessary.

Basically when I don't have an example in my own codebase that I can use as prior art. I always want to find out what obstacles other people have found, as a way of making the process go more smoothly.

Nine times out of ten I end up at either Stack Exchange or W3Schools.

I agree with the other answers that it is a function of how familiar I am with the language/framework. But I also like to see what other solutions people have come up with since I know there might always be an edge case I didn't think of.

9 times yesterday, according to my browser history. It was a slow day, though.

Dozens of times a day.

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