My first job outside of uni (College for the Americans) was as a developer.
Originally I wanted to be a video game developer. I planned to get my diploma (Not a degree, maybe a blog post for another time!) and go straight into game development.
I fell in love with scripting and making software. The game development industry seemed chaotic and lost it’s appeal, so I stuck to software development and got myself a job.
As almost all developers will know StackOverflow is an essential tool. It described as so:
Stack Overflow is a question-and-answer website for computer programmers. It features questions and answers on certain computer programming topics. It was created to be a more open alternative to earlier question and answer websites such as Experts-Exchange.
If you ever need to convert a float to a string (for example), you can very quickly find someone from 12 years ago asking the same thing.
My problem with StackOverflow is my own. It’s an amazing site if you want a quick answer, but therein lies my main issue.
For me, if I was stuck on an issue I would search the error message, find a similar StackOverflow question, and get an answer. Great!
But what did I learn?
Well, nothing. If I ran into the same issue again, I would go back to searching it. I wouldn’t actually learn anything.
I knew I could just search my issue up and get an answer. If I couldn’t find an answer straight away I would keep digging, or ask it myself.
When you’re just given the answer you don’t really learn how or why it solves your issue. You just know it does. This goes well until you start using something incredibly new (or ancient).
RTFD
My co-worker would always tell me to ‘Read the fucking docs’. It’s something I heard a lot over the years and never really thought about.
Turns out it’s really good advice.
Getting the answer on StackOverflow is quick and easy, but reading the documentation will make you understand. Once I started reading documentation I started understanding what I could actually start doing with a language.
I understood how things started working. I felt like a much better developer when I could read an error message, and immediately know what I did wrong. I still had some pretty bad imposter syndrome but I felt more confident in myself.
Nowadays whenever I have an issue I look for the documentation. It might take longer but I feel like I’m actually learning, rather than just being given the answer. StackOverflow is an amazing tool, but I try not to use it.
That’s it! This is my first blog post. I’d like to give a big thanks to Jean for inspiring me to finally write this. I’m excited to write more and finally get stuff out there.
Feel free to follow me on Mastodon. Lots of love.