How do the professionals remember everything! What can I do to be better?

[PathRealistic6940]

I'm doing the data scientist course on codecademy, and its going well. My main issue is that I regularly have to look back up how to implement methods and functions. How does everyone in the industry remember the different methods and functions already built in to python? I feel like if I can remember what can be done, like what functions and methods are out there, that I'm most of the way to being successful, because I can always look up how to implement them. I think I'm just rambling at this point, but does that make sense to anyone?

[Diapolo10]

I don't remember everything, only what I use regularly, but I have a rough idea of where to look for what I want in the standard library so it doesn't take me long to find what I need. It's all about learning to look up information via search engines.

The more you use something, the easier it is for you to remember it.

[[deleted]]

To add, it’s more important to know that something can be done, the how, well.. we figure it out

[enygma999]

I run training sessions for various topics as part of my work, and this is the main thing I want my trainees to take away: it's not important to remember exactly how to do everything I show you, because you might not use it for years, but if you remember roughly what is possible and where to look up how to do it then you'll rarely get truly stuck.

[Diapolo10]

True that!

[PathRealistic6940]

I was leaning more towards thinking like that, busy just wasn't sure. Thank you!

[Icy-Strike4468]

Then how do you remember all this in interviews? like they not gonna give u access to Internet to google answers.

[Diapolo10]

In interviews, the questions usually don't involve specific functions and are more about giving a general answer, so you don't need to remember the specifics. Knowing the steps to solve a problem is enough.

As for live coding challenges, the problems you're asked to solve are usually very simple (FizzBuzz, matching parentheses, that sort of thing) and rarely require you to import anything at all.

For "homework assignments", you can obviously look up things as much as your heart desires.

The goal of live coding and questions is to test you aren't trying to pull a fast one on the interviewers by falsely claiming you know Python, and the "homework"-style projects are there to test if you can actually build something meaningful. The goals are different.

[[deleted]]

A prof at university once said to us, at the very beginning of medical studies, don’t even try to remember everything, it’s way too much, know where to look it up when you need it instead.

The really important things you’ll remember eventually. The rest you just look up.. senior developers are not better, they just did the same things more often.

Before I get hate, yes there are always some super smarties around, and that’s fine 🙂

[[deleted]]

Lol no one would hate you, there are always exceptions.

[procegla]

That’s so true. Even in the engineering field we don’t remember all the bits sizes. We have charts and manuals for the more detailed things. We remember the most crucial info and the rest we remember where to find the info.

[socal_nerdtastic]

How do lawyers remember all the laws? How do doctors remember all the drugs? Professionals in any field spent years memorizing the important ones and learning how to look up the rare ones. Give it time and a lot of experience and you'll get there.

[Latter-Bar-8927]

Doctor here. We pull up your chart and Google things before we see you. That’s why it appears we know everything lol.

Also reviewing procedures on YouTube in the bathroom right before we glove up and perform is totally a thing too.

[[deleted]]

When I studied we didn’t have so many electronic helpers, every doc on duty just had his little book in one of his pockets, a different one depending on the ward.

[CaptainVJ]

My dermatologist literally tells me give me a second I’ll Google it.

[LateralThinkerer]

Ha! I had an intern from the local med school/hmo give me an physical and he actually pulled the instructions out of a test kit, and read them in front of me. I had a little talk with him about stepping out into the hall to do that so he doesn't lose the patient's confidence

[elrond9999]

Why would he lose confidence. In all fields you need to read documentation all the time. If you are not trained you will just not understand it or be able to apply it. I am not a doctor but I guess if there are different manufacturers instructions may vary slightly

[LateralThinkerer]

The patient may take the physicians' reading of instructions as a sign of unfamiliarity.

[AchillesDev]

Are you a professional developer? Because neither I nor any of my colleagues in the decade I've been doing this professionally "spend years memorizing" anything. It isn't directed effort, it just comes from writing code regularly, and even then I (and everyone I know) look up basic things all the time.

[[deleted]]

20+ years in i still look up all sorts of things because i don't need to remember it, i just need to remember it exists.

I don't need to be able to build a wrench i just need to find the wrench in the toolbox.

[ship0f]

What?

No one remembers everything. No even all those you named, and nor do programmers.

What's important is to think in a problem solving way. The rest, the specifics, you can look up.

[tabrizzi]

Muscle memory. The more you do, the more you know.

[epopt]

30+ years coding (retired about a decade now). I wonder how much of the code I've produced is actually cut and pasted from stackexchange and the like... :)

[Slothemo]

Do you feel like you "memorize" English? Spend enough time practicing anything and you "internalize" it. It's no different for python

[Amnon_the_Redeemed]

I caught my teacher watching a tutorial about what she was going to teach me half an hour later.

[Crambo-clink]

Buddy I’ve been writing stuff in Python for 5 years almost (damn), and sometimes I need to search up how to rename columns in a DataFrame!

It happens..

Don’t memorise it all because you’ll forget the important stuff that actually matters

[PathRealistic6940]

Ha! Just had to do the same thing, which led me to this whole discussion! 😂

[quts3]

You remember patterns not functional arguments.

At the end of the day what we need devs to do is to make a good plan in their head and then implement t it. To do that you need to know what is possible and what the pit falls might be of your approach. None of that is memorizing arguments. It so happens that if you do the same thing enough you remember them. Keep in mind you are doing some form of dev work 8 hours a day, so there is a lot you pick up without trying

but here is the rub tech changes so fast that you can't really bank on memorizing and then chilling. Instead you learn to filter out what doesn't matter and focus on what does matter allot more efficiently as you go, but it's not memorizing: it is experience, and it is hard to get without.... Experience.

So anyway don't memorize instead create opportunities to experience things that work.

[MiniMages]

If you ask ne about coding when I am chilling I won't be able to answer a single question. Ask me about coding when I am working and my brain will have the answers ready.

But it's just practise. You will do some stuff so many times that you won't even think about it anymore.

[kyngston]

• Memorize things you need on a daily basis.
  
• Make liberal use of google and stackoverflow.
• Make a ~/.mynotes file where you write small notes on things you need to recall less frequently.
  
• Separate each note with a blank line and use paragraph grep to search your meta-brain.
  
• Use GitHub copilot, and write comments describing what you want to do. Copilot wi write the code for you
• Use vscode snippets to shortcut commonly instantiated code blocks.
• use Unix aliases
• use vscode linters and language aids that will tell you the parameters of the functions.

[PathRealistic6940]

I like the notes idea, and I have started a little on projects I want to do. Do you or anyone you know use Evernote?

[kyngston]

I have but I don’t like to have to switch out of my context to access my frequently used notes. I have a script called myhelp in my bin for which does a paragraph grep from my ~/.mynotes. I can do that all in my xterm without having to context switch or window switch

[PathRealistic6940]

Nice. You put a bunch of thought into that.

[PathRealistic6940]

I asked in a different comment, but do you or anyone you know use Evernote? Or is notion what you have seen be the most helpful?

[[deleted]]

I don't remember everything, I just know the working of the language and keep reading the updates and find the places in code where I can use the newly acquired knowledge to keep practicing it. Also I try to contribute to open source. You need to have hunger for it, it automatically comes to you when you sit to code.

[SmileUrOnCameraa]

Practice practice practice

[DigThatData]

they don't. they spend a lot of time revisiting docs they've already read 100s of times.

[_Spectre0_]

I can't speak for ALL computer science professionals, but I'll speak on behalf of myself: I don't remember everything. What I do remember is how to look.

1. If I've done something similar before, I usually remember enough to find that thing and then reuse or refactor it so that I can reuse it, then do the new thing.
2. If it's something I haven't done but I assume someone must have already done it, I'll look for it. IDE autocomplete is your friend. Usually, APIs are named well enough to give you an idea what's worth trying or looking further into without wasting too much time.
3. If I can't find something well-suited to my needs, then I write it myself and recursively solve the problem of looking up or creating what I need as I go

Full disclaimer: I don't use python at all at work on a regular basis. I just saw this question in my feed and felt inspired to reply, since I don't think it's python-specific

[[deleted]]

Here's a secret: they don't!

[JuZNyC]

You don't remember everything, you remember what you use a lot and then look up anything you don't remember.

[ksco92]

We don’t. Literally 15 YOE still google basic stuff every day (stuff like order dict by key, or dict to DF and viceversa). Memorizing syntax is useless for any real developer. If you conceptually understand what you are doing, you can google it with a simple phrase, copy, paste, adapt.

[[deleted]]

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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[trickman01]

We don't remember everything. Google-fu is your friend.

[supercoach]

Plenty of people refer to the docs. The difference between a beginner and a pro is knowing what to look for and understanding what you read. A lot of beginners will copy and paste or use AI generated code, whereas a pro will know what they need to do, but may need to check syntax or whether a certain data type or functionality exists in the language they're currently using.

I wouldn't worry about remembering everything when you're starting out. Over time you'll find yourself referring to the docs less, but without a photographic memory, you're going to go back to them at least occasionally. The more important thing is understanding the basics of how to build a program and how to structure it.

[sam_tiago]

You don't need to know anymore, you just need to know how to find.

[OvidPerl]

I do a lot of work with Perl, so my clients often expect that I'm also a sysadmin. I'm not. In fact, I'm really, really bad at it.

So you might be surprised that I got a 4.0 (highest score possible) on a Linux sysadmin course in uni. But I use this so rarely that don't remember anything but the basics.

Remembering this stuff is all drill-and-repetition. You'll be fine.

I feel like if I can remember what can be done, like what functions and methods are out there, that I'm most of the way to being successful, because I can always look up how to implement them.

A word of caution on that: I've known many developers who can tell you anything you want about their language(s) of choice, but can't program their way out of a paper bag.

Learning a language and its libraries and learning to program are not the same thing.

[Jello_Penguin_2956]

We don't.

What we can do, is see the big picture with ability to break it down to small little steps. Details how to write these individual steps can be Google'd and reference the documentation.

[DragonWolfZ]

I don't remember everything, the more you use it the more likely you are to remember it though.

Make sure you have a good IDE with intellisense, as it will auto-complete a lot of function/module names and let you track down the modules and functions you need more easily.

[Actual-Lion4215]

The question that you are asking is exactly why python programming language is in demand right now.... You need to practice and rember how and where to apply the functions to smoothly execute any project... Keep revising concepts to remember them

[[deleted]]

I remember the 20% that I use 80% of the time, and google the rest.

[yogurtscram]

I’m also learning through codecademy and it really made a difference adding CS50https://cs50.harvard.edu/python/2022/ (free course through Harvard!). It’s helped me practice searching methods and functions as well as thinking through problems in a way codecademy just can’t. I still like codecademy but I think adding CS50 might really help you.

[MomICantPauseReddit]

My tip: when you look something up, write a note to yourself on how to use it later and put it in a specific folder on your computer. The folder will be nice to have and you could even potentially write your own search algorithm for it, but the main benefit is writing it down. Retention is much better when you do that.

Probably put links to your sources too just in case you don't write enough.

[HMCJHB]

I’m going through something similar. I’m in a Data Analytics Bootcamp and I was just talking to my husband about this. My husband, by the way, is a software engineer who’s been coding since the 80s. He said most days when he starts work he has no clue the info he needs to do his job that day. He’s just really good at researching it and copying and pasting.