I went one stint where I didn't start a new project for 5 years. Practicing new projects in that time period would have been a whole lot of wasted time.
Very similar to physical fitness. Sitting all day trains you to sit. And that’s making you more fragile
Most of the inner working is hidden
I guess I know now why every other website pegs my CPU to 100% to slowly display static text and break the browser's back button - professional software engineers are "bored to death" when doing their job so they have to make things "interesting" in order to entertain themselves.
We live together, I work from home, they school from home.
I manage to not get bored.
most frameworks come either with examples or commands to get your started. symfony even had their docs available for local reading as well.
with python i always have to delve into reading obscure documentation that either makes no sense or is not up to date. and there are too few packages for what you normally need in a scalable app. so yeah you can write php code without googling, as long as you are not a complete noob in web development.
if its 2021 and you still write code using vim and niche languages then you are doing it wrong, and indeed google is your only hope.
That's literally what I keep hearing since 30 years lol (for vi proper not vim, that is).
Please don't dismiss comments for grammar or spelling mistakes. These are not substantial criticisms of the argument being made, and are IMO a form of ad-hominem.
My own comment was precipitated by the sneering tone I read in (sic!)
Which itself points out a grammatical mistake unnecessarily. Then compounds this, by making a more egregious mistake.
Really my comment was making the same point. Don't point out grammatical mistakes, which is the precise purpose of (sic).
had a client once where its workers were day dreaming of a job in the valley and ofc they were using python. they bashed php on a daily basis, and as they were doing it, the php api was sole codebase running in production (essentially the company’s product) and running reliably for a few years.
the python workers were still struggling with basics such as queues and isc, and digging through non existent or vaguely written documentation. was a fun experience watching them struggle as i basically cloned repos, read the code or entry points for that code and get things shipped.
since then i started loving python. development is slower and my invoices keep coming. love it. occasionally i write some lib thats already been implemented in plenty of php and nodejs packages.
oh same client had a ruby codebase that kept failing and couldnt find devs to work on it. fun times.
If I was allowed to look at what I already have on my machine I could even set up a build process for my site. If not allowed then no build process.
But it would probably be pretty slow to write this, depending on how basic the site was, and it would not be as good as if I could look things up when I needed to.
But I wouldn't be able to deploy without searching.
That’s cool if true but until you try it you could be fooling yourself. The other thing is that it’s not really a skill that’s valuable in such a connected age, except in contrived scenarios like closed book coding interviews, maybe.
However my confidence that I could do this slowly and of poor quality is that - I started making websites 20 years ago so making and index.html file and linking to each file by hand and I still do this every now and then when making little static sites (like if a site is 4-8 pages I might just do it by hand). And the stuff I look up for sites like that are generally - how do I do this cool thing in CSS.
Admittedly if I did it this way the site I am envisioning doesn't look much better than Berkshire Hathaway's https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/
on edit: also there is some question if one is just allowed to do what one can remember in one's head or if, without using an internet search engine, one can use the stuff one has on local computers and devices? In which case I have some complicated stuff here to reference going back a lot of years, a lot of ebooks, local hardcopy books. So in that case I think I can do just about anything that can be done with search (except for using newest CSS, es2019 features), but still significantly slower.
I don't see the value of memorizing somethings you just do once.
That said you're right, even the 99% of work still involves a lot of fiddling and sometimes research outside of writing code.
Using Google and GitHub I found RMUIF, which, like many available templates, is based on React's standard create-react-app
Maybe a “Big brother season 1” style. I’d watch that.
Things are more complex, but a lot of documentation is also now online instead of printed or distributed on floppies.
Granted, this assumes that the deployment target is ready to receive the deployment payload...
I'm pretty sure I could do it depending on our definition of basic web app. With something Rails it's not even really that hard. Rails g scaffold [Model] gets you 95% of the way there.
I can make a basic web app without googling.
This isn't the old days of FTP, Perl or PHP anymore. There are too much information I cant memorise every single bit of it. And I dont think you should either. Especially in the age of Google. My memory capacity has its limit, and there are things I just decide it is not important enough to memorise when I could easily search for it. ( Or if I am relying on Heroku )
I have long thought of Directing a video, where we have famous Developers, or developers from a pieces of software that normal people would have heard of, filming them doing work, looking up silly things in Google. Starring at the screen for hours and absolutely dont have a clue what the code is doing. Not typing any code for hours. Sort of like Reality TV shows for Programmers.
Hollywood Movies and Anime has made the perception that proper Software programmers should be super fast touch typist and typing code with insane speed. It makes people uneasy when they learn programming. It turns out they have to constantly look up some manual, googling, copy and pasting and for most of the time not typing anything. They thought they are just not any good at it and many simply gave up.
The reality is, hopefully the video would show, even top level programmers dont know everything. And it is perfectly normal to look things up.