I find it's often the case these days that I want to do something with a given tool, so I look up how to do that thing. I get the answer, and I can move on. Often I don't really understand why the specific syntax is the way it is, but if it works, that's all I need most of the time. I think in those days, that presented a huge difficulty, because you had to actually parse the documentation to figure out how to do the thing! I imagine a lot of the time, if someone could have told you, "oh, here's the format/syntax/structure you need," it would have been a lot less painful! I'm guessing a bit less fun if you're already the type inclined to that sort of thing though! :D
30+ years of tech, retired from an identity intelligence company, now part-time with an insurance broker.
Dev community mod - mostly light gardening & weeding out spam :)
I'm definitely the sort of person that cannot use 'magic solutions', I need to know how stuff works, which is a curse in some ways as it can tarpit my progress on things, but I have coping mechanisms (like pomodoro) that can limit this effect, the upside is I'm a mine of useless technical trivia :D
I think these days we have to limit ourselves to define an interface between our work and some external system - I mean that in a very general way, e.g. the system could be a piece of math or science, not necessarily a computer API. I generally try to understand the principles behind things to the extent that I can, but there is just too much stuff out there, so I believe it's simply necessary nowadays to make a decision about how important it is know a given tool or concept in more depth...
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I find it's often the case these days that I want to do something with a given tool, so I look up how to do that thing. I get the answer, and I can move on. Often I don't really understand why the specific syntax is the way it is, but if it works, that's all I need most of the time. I think in those days, that presented a huge difficulty, because you had to actually parse the documentation to figure out how to do the thing! I imagine a lot of the time, if someone could have told you, "oh, here's the format/syntax/structure you need," it would have been a lot less painful! I'm guessing a bit less fun if you're already the type inclined to that sort of thing though! :D
I'm definitely the sort of person that cannot use 'magic solutions', I need to know how stuff works, which is a curse in some ways as it can tarpit my progress on things, but I have coping mechanisms (like pomodoro) that can limit this effect, the upside is I'm a mine of useless technical trivia :D
I think these days we have to limit ourselves to define an interface between our work and some external system - I mean that in a very general way, e.g. the system could be a piece of math or science, not necessarily a computer API. I generally try to understand the principles behind things to the extent that I can, but there is just too much stuff out there, so I believe it's simply necessary nowadays to make a decision about how important it is know a given tool or concept in more depth...