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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

Pre-web, you basically had a lot of reference books, used external libraries very judiciously (and there were relatively few of them anyway), and generally kept software stacks pretty simple. And, yes, probably took a lot more time.

More generally speaking, most people today would be incredibly frustrated getting information about anything generally if they were plopped down 30 years ago. When I was a product manager back then, we paid consulting companies large sums of money to get the most basic competitive information faxed to us because you couldn't just look it up.

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>Pre-web, you basically had a lot of reference books, used external libraries very judiciously (and there were relatively few of them anyway), and generally kept software stacks pretty simple. And, yes, probably took a lot more time.

As a new developer, this is what I am doing and focusing at. Not be reliant on the internet and it works. Because I have several books and for example I can read Mozilla MDN offline.

So what's the difference between looking it up in place A (books, offline MDN) or place b (stackoverflow, blogs, online MDN)?

I think it'll build better debugging skills by the time you're more senior and/or working on more novel problems that might not be on SO yet.

Also, retention seems to be better for me when researching a book vs online. It's kind of a mental thing probably. "I don't want to have to stop to pull that book down every time I need this, so I better remember this" compared to "I don't really need to remember this because it's just a websearch away"

This, is what I meant to say in my reactions.

Why would those debugging skills be 'better'?

I am trying to be less dependent on the Internet and try train myself to be better, that's it. Same goes for game too right? Look-up solution and the puzzle is done. Without thinking.

I use a website/app and books, the website updates itself. But for some things I still need to look elsewhere than Mozilla MDN, e.g W3.org

> … and for example I can read Mozilla MDN offline.

Mozilla MDN is pretty much the last thing I’d prioritize for offline reading, since it’s relevance is tightly coupled to the availability of the network.

I might prioritize offline resources for Raspberry Pi and other computing platforms, that make more sense without the Internet.

But above that, maybe a few books about growing food in one’s own garden. :-)

Not sure how books on gardening have anything to do with coding workflows, but yeah, okay.

There's a difference of building a reference library for home use or homesteading, crafting, etc than say working for 8 hours on a coding project directly tied to the need to use the computer. Computer languages/libraries/etc change frequently enough printed books become obsolete fast. How/when to plant, what to feed them, etc hasn't changed too much for generations. Nor things like when to use a dovetail joint, or other building techniques. Books from the 1900s would be just as useful today.

There was also the glory of the MSDN library cds. Those were a marvelous invention.

I learned C# 2.0, when the offline MSDN was still a thing. That language environment I can still work in with ease, from memory, without consulting online resources. Good offline documentation (and good library design) works wonders.

A lot of the programming I did was pre-Windows. But, yes, MSDN was a pretty remarkable developer resource at a time when developer resources were pretty fragmented/hit and miss.

Oh, man. The feeling of those 6 binders arriving at the office with this year's edition.

What did you when you got stuck on some small thing that wasn't obvious from the docs? Say some interaction between two concepts?

Nowadays I've always discovered that I'm not the first person to ask.

You thought it through, investigated the issue, came to a conclusion, created a hypothesis, and tested a solution. Now, the cycle seems to be read a problem ticket, see what other people have done, copy code, close ticket.

I can't help but feel that this type of workflow just took a huge step forward in https://copilot.github.com/ too. A solid recognition that thats how most people code distilled into a product that automates that lookup by cross referencing information on the worlds largest code platform.

A step forward, but also potentially a step backwards compared to the “harder” workflow (the one without all answers on stack overflow).

Just a small example, I imagine there are a lot of JS developers who know that they need to create a new function using “=>” or “.bind(this)” if they need access to “this” within the function… and if they don’t, things break, without really knowing why (even though they know the solution).

TLDR: the best developers I’ve worked with go beyond “knowing the solution” to “knowing why the solution is the solution”. Understanding “why” something is the way it is becomes difficult when something like Copilot autocompletes the correct answer.

And tbh, you beat your head against the wall until you managed to find the solution...somehow.

And sometimes just find some other way to accomplish what you needed done.

Which might be after you've gone home and just stopped thinking about it. Mine usually comes the next moring in the shower.

Sometimes pulling an all nighter and beating your head on the wall is less productive than just stopping to take a break and coming back at it with a fresh mind. FAANG PMs don't get this and probably think less of you because your Zen like approach is anathema to their fast paced do or die approach now. You can't be productive if your butt isn't in the chair.

When phones still had IR blasters, I got stuck for 3 weeks straight on a IR library that needed to imitate the sequences coming from a TV remote. Code was “done” in 2 days, the rest was spent in front of a TV to have my sequences get recognized.

Literally went to the library to read books on IR and make sure I understood what the doc was saying. Asked around to find people who worked on these kind of sequencing. Went to a small repair shop and bribed the tech to give me hints on how remotes work.

It was fun in retrospect, maddening and incredibly taxing at the time.

What would you do differently?

With prior knowledge of how quirky it is, I'd sacrifice way more time finding an expert from the start.

I don't think we did anything fundamentally wrong, short of underestimating the problem space. It's also not as if I was left in my corner for weeks, I got pretty good advices (like go finding more help and returning to basics). Getting info before the internet, before makers got into habits of published maintenance manuals etc. life was just way harder.

> And, yes, probably took a lot more time.

But it was less stressful, because you didn't have daily standups and biweekly sprints.

Now you import isEven(), burnout because of all those crappy third parties and look for a job in go. And in 10 years when it will have overinflated like java and become a piece of garbage you'll rinse and repeat.

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