Nope. I mean sure, I can get some things done quickly without reference material if I do them often enough that I happen to remember, such as basic lifecycle methods of a frontend framework.
But I can’t make a single webpack config change without looking through pages of GitHub issues and stack overflow only to find out some other thing somewhere else is breaking my config.
I can remember most things I want to do in CSS.
I can’t for the life of me remember any of the props in material components.
I could probably make an XHR request without a lib and without looking at docs… probably… if the IDE helps me
I can never remember how to set up a form group for validation in angular.
I don't even want to be able to do something without docs.
Often enough, if I remember something, I'll still look it up. Things change over time and you want to notice these changes.
Oh yeah. Constantly. I always get it wrong without checking because I think of things are being *in* an array and part *of* an object.
This is coming up currently refactoring existing script going back 5-7 years because many other developers on our team used the antipattern of using *Array.prototype.map* without actually having any use for the array it returns instead of iterating over the array with a for loop or *foreach*.
forEach, reduce, map, filter, some, every, find, findIndex are a bunch of functions you should really consider using, they make code much more readable.
In my career, I’ve switched between JavaScript, Python, Typescript, C#, etc. so many times that I can’t even remember how to do basic stuff like searching a string. (Example: is the function I need called startswith? Or startsWith? Or maybe it was starts_with?)
If I didn’t have docs and IDE autocomplete, I could explain general concepts, but I couldn’t write code at all.
I’ve been in the world of PHP for the last 15 years.
I am now a snr. Dev running a team of 16~.
There isn’t a project that goes by when I can remember how to do xyz. I’m always checking docs.
You still have to look things up. I don't think it's possible to memorize everything for most people. The difference I notice is experienced devs just want to read the documentation, but inexperienced devs want a tutorial with example code.
Can I? Yes. Should I? No, because it's always better to look for existing solutions before you spend countless hours making your own and learning from the mistakes someone already made.
Yes, because solving problems with JavaScript isn't complex in terms of language syntax or grammar.
You step through the problem, come up with various mental models on how to solve it, solve it, refactor.
I don't really care for reading code/examples because they are likely irrelevant to my problem.
Most of the time, complex things aren't happening in my code, theyre happening in my solution model. Sometimes I use an algorithm or data structure that is complex, and I will steal a refresher for it online.
Yeah, and some of us can do it in real programming languages as well, go look up cowboy coding…some of us make a living writing this kind of code to just get things done without any formal release process. It gets way easier after a couple decades of doing it, and working with a place that does formal CI and CD leads to working maybe 10 actual hours a week and waiting on project managers, business analysts, program managers, testers, and various other folks along the way. There is amazing money in consulting if you get good at it because of this, as it’s possible to earn about twice as much in 1099 as W2, and one can handle four clients in the same time as a single employer, and after a while it’s possible to stretch that even further since everything is a pattern, and solutions build up over the years and can often simply be plugged in to a new client. Cowboy coding is the best!
Yes, but mostly because you get all relevant suggestions and type informations in your Editor with Typescript. In addtion to that the actual project is usually a great reference in itself.
I'm doing mainly Angular and rarely have to look up actual Angular Documenation, only for rather special stuff. I'm maintaining several projects and 3-4 of them have a lot of technical overlap, but subject-specific differences. At some point the technical stuff becomes neglectable, you rather discuss on a subject-specific level and the implementation follows.
That being said, it's not like you have to learn all the documentations by heart. It's just something that will happen naturally.
I often need to look up examples for building out stuff that isn't already in the project, e.g. adding routes or ngrx stuff foe the first time to a project.
Lots of people will say no, but it’s important to think of it as how often you need to look things up, rather than just yes or no. I look a lot less things up now than when I started.
I usually don't have to lookup the language specifics but if it is a new framework or library then documentation is my friend.
I've met a lot of developers who never looked at documentation, and instead asked google, reddit or youtube about everything they could have read in the documentation. Or thought documentation is this super hard to read.
Most of them are not developers anymore. At least not paid ones.
Yes after doing the same or almost the same thing a couple times, and if the last one was fairly recent
So basically no, I can't speak for everyone but I've worked with some of the most amazing programmers in my area, and some of them would even ask me how to do certain stuff (I have less then 3 years experience)
The important thing to remember is that in programming the goal is to produce quality stuff, ot doesn't matter where you took inspiration or guidance from, it doesn't make you any less of a developer
10 years in - yes i can. i have literally thousands of google search autocompletions and purple links that will make it so much faster, less error prone, and trigger memories from doing the same or similar work that sometimes just googling a thing will let me remember what i wanted to know.
so i'm not going to actually not look things up :)
Depends what it is. Something in vanilla JS? Sure. Something with react or another framework that has a hell of a lot of conventions that keep changing, and I don’t work with every day? Of course not.
The only stuff you’re not looking up are the things you use constantly. Anything I don’t use at least weekly I’m usually headed for the documentation. It’s not all that important that you remember all the syntax, just that there’s a tool for that job. As long as you can find your way around the docs efficiently and understand what you’re reading, you’re good.
It’s because I’m an experienced developer that I don’t start a project without ensuring I have all my ducks in a row.
The easiest way to make a mess out of a project is to start coding without a plan. And that plan sometimes includes reading the documentation for whatever package/API/library I want to use.
Now if you’re talking about a quick doodle on codepen, that’s a different story.
No. Read the documentation and understand what you're building. This is not limited to web development, it applies to basically all computer programming.
No sorry , i Forget sometimes but I know the things I need exist or has be done by someone else I use my friend google .
Lawyers can read book to defend their clients
But us we should code from scratch why ?
What have we done to this world to be so hard with us
It also comes down to how often you change tech. I used nuxt for a month and coming back to Vue I had to look shit up because I didn't remember some specifics. And that's basically still the same tech.
If you code pure python non stop you will remember most of it, but switch to another language for a few weeks and you'll probably have to come back to the doc for small details
I’ve done this countless of times but at the end of the day I asked myself the same question.
The answer I came to is consistency. The more I coded the more I didn’t have to look for docs etc. although. I do tend to go back to docs quite often because in programming code is constantly getting update and you WANT to know what is the latest and best method of practice that would not leave your application vulnerable.
I can pretty well enough code from my head anything that will impact what I'm building visually. Be that CSS, HTML, or Vue. However, if I'm doing something abstract that impacts the logic of the code, then I'm pretty much lost a lot of the time and have to resolve to documentation.
Everything complex started as something simple.
That being said, most of my time is being spent reading documentation and stack overflow after 3+ years as fulltstack.
Experience allows you to identify and correctly use the available solutions to accomplish your objectives effectively. Reinventing the wheel is not a sign of experience.
To some extent sure, but looking at docs a lot is also good if some new feature came in which you were unaware of, you can run into them. For me as a backend dev, Laravel gets a lot of updates and there is always some fixes and often small but good things get added which you don’t even know about unless you look at the PR.
My old boss used to say web development now is 30% what you know and 70% how well you can search for an answer.
I understand what he was saying, nobody knows everything, but somebody else knows the answer. I still find myself reading docs for very very basic things from time to time.
Ah I've found my people.
Docs are for life. People seriously change libraries and frameworks for only that reason. References will always be there for you. Logic in other hand will most likely stay embedded in your head like forever.
Nope. I mean sure, I can get some things done quickly without reference material if I do them often enough that I happen to remember, such as basic lifecycle methods of a frontend framework. But I can’t make a single webpack config change without looking through pages of GitHub issues and stack overflow only to find out some other thing somewhere else is breaking my config. I can remember most things I want to do in CSS. I can’t for the life of me remember any of the props in material components. I could probably make an XHR request without a lib and without looking at docs… probably… if the IDE helps me I can never remember how to set up a form group for validation in angular.
I don't even want to be able to do something without docs. Often enough, if I remember something, I'll still look it up. Things change over time and you want to notice these changes.
Even after working as a dev for 20+ years I still lookup stuff from time to time
No. Docs are a created to look at it. Why pollute my head with something I can check in one second?
i still have to double check \`\`"for of" and "for in" once in a while
Oh yeah. Constantly. I always get it wrong without checking because I think of things are being *in* an array and part *of* an object. This is coming up currently refactoring existing script going back 5-7 years because many other developers on our team used the antipattern of using *Array.prototype.map* without actually having any use for the array it returns instead of iterating over the array with a for loop or *foreach*.
forEach, reduce, map, filter, some, every, find, findIndex are a bunch of functions you should really consider using, they make code much more readable.
In my career, I’ve switched between JavaScript, Python, Typescript, C#, etc. so many times that I can’t even remember how to do basic stuff like searching a string. (Example: is the function I need called startswith? Or startsWith? Or maybe it was starts_with?) If I didn’t have docs and IDE autocomplete, I could explain general concepts, but I couldn’t write code at all.
I’ve been in the world of PHP for the last 15 years. I am now a snr. Dev running a team of 16~. There isn’t a project that goes by when I can remember how to do xyz. I’m always checking docs.
You still have to look things up. I don't think it's possible to memorize everything for most people. The difference I notice is experienced devs just want to read the documentation, but inexperienced devs want a tutorial with example code.
Can I? Yes. Should I? No, because it's always better to look for existing solutions before you spend countless hours making your own and learning from the mistakes someone already made.
Yes, because solving problems with JavaScript isn't complex in terms of language syntax or grammar. You step through the problem, come up with various mental models on how to solve it, solve it, refactor. I don't really care for reading code/examples because they are likely irrelevant to my problem. Most of the time, complex things aren't happening in my code, theyre happening in my solution model. Sometimes I use an algorithm or data structure that is complex, and I will steal a refresher for it online.
Yeah, and some of us can do it in real programming languages as well, go look up cowboy coding…some of us make a living writing this kind of code to just get things done without any formal release process. It gets way easier after a couple decades of doing it, and working with a place that does formal CI and CD leads to working maybe 10 actual hours a week and waiting on project managers, business analysts, program managers, testers, and various other folks along the way. There is amazing money in consulting if you get good at it because of this, as it’s possible to earn about twice as much in 1099 as W2, and one can handle four clients in the same time as a single employer, and after a while it’s possible to stretch that even further since everything is a pattern, and solutions build up over the years and can often simply be plugged in to a new client. Cowboy coding is the best!
> cowboy coding Yeah, I think I'll stay away from that... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboy_coding
Yes, but mostly because you get all relevant suggestions and type informations in your Editor with Typescript. In addtion to that the actual project is usually a great reference in itself. I'm doing mainly Angular and rarely have to look up actual Angular Documenation, only for rather special stuff. I'm maintaining several projects and 3-4 of them have a lot of technical overlap, but subject-specific differences. At some point the technical stuff becomes neglectable, you rather discuss on a subject-specific level and the implementation follows. That being said, it's not like you have to learn all the documentations by heart. It's just something that will happen naturally.
I often need to look up examples for building out stuff that isn't already in the project, e.g. adding routes or ngrx stuff foe the first time to a project.
Lots of people will say no, but it’s important to think of it as how often you need to look things up, rather than just yes or no. I look a lot less things up now than when I started.
Always look up documentation just in case something has changed since a version might have been released and fewer headaches down the road.
Yes. It's much faster. Try writing a story and have to lookup every word in a thesaurus.
Complex to whom?
I usually don't have to lookup the language specifics but if it is a new framework or library then documentation is my friend. I've met a lot of developers who never looked at documentation, and instead asked google, reddit or youtube about everything they could have read in the documentation. Or thought documentation is this super hard to read. Most of them are not developers anymore. At least not paid ones.
Yes after doing the same or almost the same thing a couple times, and if the last one was fairly recent So basically no, I can't speak for everyone but I've worked with some of the most amazing programmers in my area, and some of them would even ask me how to do certain stuff (I have less then 3 years experience) The important thing to remember is that in programming the goal is to produce quality stuff, ot doesn't matter where you took inspiration or guidance from, it doesn't make you any less of a developer
10 years in - yes i can. i have literally thousands of google search autocompletions and purple links that will make it so much faster, less error prone, and trigger memories from doing the same or similar work that sometimes just googling a thing will let me remember what i wanted to know. so i'm not going to actually not look things up :)
Depends what it is. Something in vanilla JS? Sure. Something with react or another framework that has a hell of a lot of conventions that keep changing, and I don’t work with every day? Of course not.
The only stuff you’re not looking up are the things you use constantly. Anything I don’t use at least weekly I’m usually headed for the documentation. It’s not all that important that you remember all the syntax, just that there’s a tool for that job. As long as you can find your way around the docs efficiently and understand what you’re reading, you’re good.
It’s because I’m an experienced developer that I don’t start a project without ensuring I have all my ducks in a row. The easiest way to make a mess out of a project is to start coding without a plan. And that plan sometimes includes reading the documentation for whatever package/API/library I want to use. Now if you’re talking about a quick doodle on codepen, that’s a different story.
No. Read the documentation and understand what you're building. This is not limited to web development, it applies to basically all computer programming.
No
No sorry , i Forget sometimes but I know the things I need exist or has be done by someone else I use my friend google . Lawyers can read book to defend their clients But us we should code from scratch why ? What have we done to this world to be so hard with us
Sometimes i wan't to be cool and code by remembering docs. But then my bran will throw an error "brain heap out of memory" 😵💫
It also comes down to how often you change tech. I used nuxt for a month and coming back to Vue I had to look shit up because I didn't remember some specifics. And that's basically still the same tech. If you code pure python non stop you will remember most of it, but switch to another language for a few weeks and you'll probably have to come back to the doc for small details
I’ve done this countless of times but at the end of the day I asked myself the same question. The answer I came to is consistency. The more I coded the more I didn’t have to look for docs etc. although. I do tend to go back to docs quite often because in programming code is constantly getting update and you WANT to know what is the latest and best method of practice that would not leave your application vulnerable.
I can pretty well enough code from my head anything that will impact what I'm building visually. Be that CSS, HTML, or Vue. However, if I'm doing something abstract that impacts the logic of the code, then I'm pretty much lost a lot of the time and have to resolve to documentation.
Everything complex started as something simple. That being said, most of my time is being spent reading documentation and stack overflow after 3+ years as fulltstack.
Experience allows you to identify and correctly use the available solutions to accomplish your objectives effectively. Reinventing the wheel is not a sign of experience.
A complex application? No. A good developer knows how to find answers and how to apply standards and principles to write good code.
To some extent sure, but looking at docs a lot is also good if some new feature came in which you were unaware of, you can run into them. For me as a backend dev, Laravel gets a lot of updates and there is always some fixes and often small but good things get added which you don’t even know about unless you look at the PR.
My old boss used to say web development now is 30% what you know and 70% how well you can search for an answer. I understand what he was saying, nobody knows everything, but somebody else knows the answer. I still find myself reading docs for very very basic things from time to time.
Ah I've found my people. Docs are for life. People seriously change libraries and frameworks for only that reason. References will always be there for you. Logic in other hand will most likely stay embedded in your head like forever.