Based on the Twitter meme from a few years back (kind of hard to search for but I'll add an example as soon as I find one), I'd like to hear the ways that you're not quite as smart/knowledgable as a junior dev might expect.
For me all of HTML is still a foreign language and I regularly google the most basic elements!
Top comments (42)
I think I'm 90% of the traffic to that CSSTricks complete guide to Flexbox article.
Long live CSS tricks flexbox article :p
Way more easy then to read the specs and most of the articles out there regarding flex.
Then I'm the other 10%. Align-self, align-content, align-items, and then none of those do anything because the divs aren't properly display: flex, display: inline-flex, display: flexbox, display:row, flex-flow: .... / this is better than floating divs, I'm told. /
Best article on the Internet
It’s such a beautiful site.
We're developers not because we can regurgitate every last word of the HTML5 standard but because we can engineer and build clean, scale-able, maintainable, and working software.
Well, because you are senior, your brain is occupied with things a little less trivial than html img tag syntax that you can find in 2 sec.
I would say its perfectly normal and desirable state of things.
There is a quote attributed to Albert E.:
I strongly believe in it in my field of work.
Remembering everything is domain of the robots, not humans, who train to be better at searching for things/solutions using abstract thinking.
Im on regex101.com every time i have to write any regexp. ;)
PS. Emmet is a pretty nice tool to minimize duckduckgo.com trips on a daily basis. Or snippets in general.
img<tab>=><img src="" alt="">That's the exact quote that came into my head when I read the post. Great minds think alike :)
Created an account just to say "Thank You" I really needed to see you this post. I've been in web development since I graduated college in 2011 and made my way up to Lead Web Developer but always had sort of an imposter syndrome because I'd often look up some tags that in my head I'd feel like I should have just known. So yeah, thanks again.
wow this comment made my day. Thanks Christopher!
So true
This page has been viewed 8 million times and I think half of them are mine. stackoverflow.com/questions/927358...
For me css is just trial and error.
There are so many resources out there now. Please take the time and effort to learn it.
I see so many developers spreading hate on it. But they never invested dedicated time on it.
Big rewards at the end of the rainbow :)
real
I google the sql update syntax almost every time that I need it, I don't know why I forget it!!!!!
oh yeah that's a huge one. I used to write sql every day, but now whenever it comes up I have to google the most basic syntax!
I google a lot the next ones:
And i don't think i'm worst professional or less senior because of that, the things i most search are in fact the ones i use less in my daily work, i don't feel insecure about the fact i cannot remember everything.
I work with a number of companies each one requiring a different tech/lib/language. While I'm in my 13th year as a coder I constantly Google for everything.
Yesterday I googled how to concatenate strings in Swift. Yes, it was "+", like in almost every other language I worked with, and yet I wasn't sure.
I prefer string interpolation on languages that support it.
let multiplier = 3let message = "\(multiplier) times 2.5 is \(Double(multiplier) * 2.5)"
// message is "3 times 2.5 is 7.5
I agree, string interpolation is cool, but sometimes I feel that some simple operations are more readable if you just use concatenation, like when adding a prefix to a string.
When my brain sees latter, it thinks "oh, some serious formatting is probably going on here, I should totally spend time and energy to carefully investigate it".
As senior developer, knowing the right keywords to search on google is also very important. All the experience doesn't help me to remember the right syntax, but it helps to connecting the dots and do the right research and provide the optimal solution.
I was actually having a conversation about this the other day with a friend.
I search for the same things as much as I did when I first started out as a dev. The only difference is Im getting better at the underlying understanding of what each of these pieces of code do. I just don't have the brain capacity to memorize every detail of how each of these puzzle pieces look but I know the general functionality of each one a lot better.
I think it is a great point that you have made here. I follow #100daysofcode on my instagram feed and I see so many photos of people learning / starting out who have taken massive amounts of notes about the sorts of things people have mentioned in the comments below, I understand you need some sort of a background but I think they are focusing their energies on trying to memorise things than learning to be a dev
Yeah this article struck such a chord I’m going to write “what to memorize, what to write down, and what you can just google”
I always forget how to use Date objects in JS, I'll probably never get the hang of them.
No wonder. Working with time and date is one of the trickiest part (and most bug ready then everything else) then any other concept ... not just in Javscript but in a lot of other languages too.
Reading all these comments make me feel much better, I feel I'm always Googling for the simplest things - many of them mentioned already!