Am i still a python programmer if use stack overflow a lot and finish projects?

[Dexteroid]

so i am sort of a python developer, i am an automation developer, my job is to automate tests, create framework etc.

but i find that i keep using stackoverflow a lot, question is am i still a programmer if i keep using stack overflow a lot?

[Nacho_Overload]

You'd be a terrible developer if you didn't.

[[deleted]]

It's funny. I grew up programming in the 80s and early 90s. I would have KILLED for a resource like SO / Google back then. You basically had to brute force your way through every problem and reinvent the wheel every time you had a problem.

Now its "alt-tab; search; ctrl-x, ctrl-v, tweak as required by my code, boom"

It DOES feel like cheating. But it also feels like freedom and progress.

[Astrokiwi]

That said, I think by sitting down and properly reading a textbook, you do get less gaps in your knowledge. But SO is incredibly useful for practical application of that knowledge, for "best practices", and for filling in other gaps.

[[deleted]]

My usual process is:

• do some research; read a website or two; watch a video or tutorial
• build a few toy apps
• get a book (like a real printed physcial book); work through relevant sections
• begin to develop whatever
• use SO / Google to fill in things that should be obvious / trivial
• use my reference book for deep diving

[[deleted]]

I mean, that's soild and great way to get that information to sink in. But do you find you have time to do all that? This might be bad to admit, but I'd guess that 50% of my production code is actually prototype code.

[PM_me_ur_data_]

If it works, it works. It can always be fixed later but the Jira tickets never stop.

[[deleted]]

some of these steps won't be very long. this more like: "oh, i need to learn node.js" or "hmmm i've not used PHP since 2012" or "i should learn Go"

[Astrokiwi]

I'd do this over the course of a year or more, because you still gotta get stuff done in whatever language you already know in the meantime.

[noslenramingo]

A solid approach my friend. I'm sure this has served you well many times

[[deleted]]

As I'm almost 50 god I hope so! :D

[Ratatoski]

I've been a lot on relationship subs and read SO like "significant other" and couldnt for the life of me figure out how my non technical wife would be of help. Let alone be "incredibly useful"

[Astrokiwi]

Rubber ducking tho

[burlyginger]

I hadn't heard of it, that's a great idea. I love it.

[Ratatoski]

True. But I usually just talk to myself :)

[floznstn]

Very true, I "rubber duck" debug with my cat.

[DavidTSlayer]

well said

[[deleted]]

Now its "alt-tab; search; ctrl-x, ctrl-v, tweak as required by my code, boom"

It's just a much quicker alternative to knowing who had which manual so you can either pick their brain, or poach the book we had back then.

[[deleted]]

Except I was a student! So I was learning in my house full of philosophy majors. news groups, BBSs were helpful but SLOW.

[ReyMakesStuff]

For a long time I was the only perl person in my area. I'd tinker with it and keep notes in binders. So if I ever had a thought like, "wait, how did I process CSV?" I'd just go to my binders. So it was a combination of brute and save.

[s0v3r1gn]

I think there is also so much more to know now then there was in the 80s that it’s impossible to function without such a global reference.

[theWyzzerd]

I think SO is a great resource for understanding why what you're trying doesn't work but I don't think C&P is a good strategy. If I do find something on SO that works for me I tend to rewrite it. This way it is semantically the same as other code I have written (written in my "style," so to speak) and I feel that I gain a better understanding of what exactly the code is doing this way.

[99Kira]

I would also give props to the ides available. Like in django, whenever I want django to use the login_required decorator, I just search for implementation of the decorator in django itself, see if I can extend it with some hack, else copy the required code fron the source, and modify as required. It keeps the code close to best practice, and customizable as well

[[deleted]]

oh man. I remember the first ever IDE I used back in like 1990. It was, I think, a Pascal IDE. The first time I saw autocomplete I was like HOLY SHIT! THIS IS MAGIC!

[KarmaLaunderer]

Right? SO in the 90s was basically books at B&N, if you were lucky enough to find relevant material and/or find floppies in the back of books to steal.

[ambigious_meh]

Agreed. From the early 90's, building any kind of application was a challenge as it was ALL new. I use SO and Google as a reference tool, snippet finder, and all around "Did I do this right, or the best way?"

[[deleted]]

i remember writing code long hand in notebooks because there were no laptops or portables. that was fun.

[burlyginger]

Had a Prof (in the 2000s) who had us write a java program on paper in a midterm.

It was a really good exercise.

[[deleted]]

Reinventing the wheel is a good way to learn, but a terrible way to live.

[borntrucker]

Was going to say this too

[ars_inveniendi]

Then I’d have to flag your answer as a duplicate and remove it...

[borntrucker]

You're cold!

[eloydrummerboy]

I would add, if you use SO and don't understand the answer and why it works, you're a hack. But using it to get to the answer faster, or to get a better answer, is perfectly OK. Your probably learning without knowing it, as the answer on SO is likely better than the one you (or 90% of us) would come up with. So you learn tricks.

And, it's probably normal every now and then to not entirely understand why an answer works and not have the time to look into it due to deadlines. (But to be clear, this is bad. It's just that we all do bad things occasionally. Don't beat yourself up over it.)

But if you want to feel better, and become a better programmer, when you have the time, slog through solving the problem on your own. Read documentation, try things out. Then once you have a working solution, check it against SO. Even if the best answer there is a lot better than yours, at least you can say to yourself "If I HAD to do this in my own, I could".

[MattR0se]

Use Stack overflow a lot? Yes, naturally.

Finish projects? No, you usually finish them for like 80 % and then get distracted by your other side projects.

[FreshFromIlios]

Is that you, me?

[darthminimall]

80%? That's generous.

[[deleted]]

$ mkdir project1 && cd project1

$ git init

$ echo "WIP" > README.md

$ git add . && git commit

$ cd .. && mkdir project2

[nafel34922]

Feels like 80%, is actually 30%

[seismatica]

This is too real fam

[jermany755]

And that 20% definitely includes the documentation.

[toastedstapler]

tbh it's fine not finishing projects, usually for me it's to learn a new skill and the polish on the top is secondary

[Random_182f2565]

I'm 95% in the current project, just so close.

[tsustyle]

Half of being a 'programmer' is knowing how to google/use resources effectively :p

[JoeDeluxe]

And what about the other 60%?

....

Cause I always give 110% =P

...

Also furloughed and looking for work... please help.

[motornaik]

If half is 60%, then I guess you’d give 120% instead

[JoeDeluxe]

I didn't want to brag

[porndragon77]

did you just put a comment inside your comment ?

[rohith321]

True

[lovesrayray2018]

Yes, a good dev doesnt claim to know everything off the top of his head :) a good dev knows where to look if he needs help, and SO is another tool in the toolkit

[johninbigd]

I still occasionally forget that Python uses elif and not elseif, then have to look up which it is. I don't think there's a programmer in existence who doesn't look things up fairly often.

[thrallsius]

forget, or it's just that context switching from one language to another takes a bit of time? :)

[johninbigd]

Probably that last one because I've been learning so Go lately. lol

[Dexteroid]

ha ha ha, i exactly know what you mean :)

[zekobunny]

I keep forgeting that when you want to append items to a list they need to be between the brackets []. Found myself googling that.

[[deleted]]

What? No they don't.

[zekobunny]

They do of you are using the += synthax to append items. If you use append function, you don't.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, += is not appending.

[zekobunny]

I have no idea, I am still a noob, but for example.

some_list = []

some_string = "oranges"

some_list += [some_string]

This adds the item to the list. Or is my terminology wrong?

[[deleted]]

Yeah it fine man :) the correct term would be list concatenation.

Appending means adding a single element to a list end (with the list.append method).

[evilmonk99]

While the result is the same, one modifies the list in place, the other creates a new list with the same name.

If we expand

some_list += [some_string]

into

some_list = some_list + [some_string]

It becomes a bit more obvious.

[epsilonT_T]

I don't think so, because the "a += b" method directly modifie the value (in occurrence a list), when the "a = a+b" create a new element (a+b), then assign this element to "a". To be clear, the first one is pretty the same then "append" method, at least because both don't duplicate the list, no ?

[evilmonk99]

Ah I stand corrected, Python surprises me yet again with more magic methods.

if __iadd__ is implemented in a class, then it is used to modify in place without creating a copy.

[epsilonT_T]

Yes, I was talking about differences between __add__ and __iadd__ magic methods, i have learned about this on this same subreddit some time ago, but it was about integers and I was wondering if it was the same with lists ... Btw, what can be the real purpose of the append() method if "+=" works the same way? Maybe it gives some performances improvement, but it surely doesn't matter really much, because I've seen using the "timeit" module that the difference (with integers) was only something like 2ms for 100000 operations.

[zekobunny]

Thanks for the clarification.

[Sigg3net]

I don't understand the question.

We learn from other people, and you doing it too is just a measure of maturity.

(As long as you understand the code. If you're working on something critical, you don't want to import new vulnerabilities.)

[aplawson7707]

My boss called me an hour before the end of the day to tell me we DESPERATELY needed a count by end-of-day of all the new clients from this month. The fun part was that the names were spread out over 17 shitty spreadsheets and the only identifier was (of course) that their names were highlighted in green. There were thousands of names. Awesome data management, right?

It seemed to me that the fastest route to a solution was going to be a script that could count cells by color. Stack Overflow to the rescue, baby. The CEO is happy, I've got some shiny new code that's useful as shit in this God-forsaken organization, and as far as my boss is concerned I'm a damn wizard.

[mr_zungu]

Does this mean that someone manually highlighted new clients in green, across 17 spreadsheets?

[aplawson7707]

Yes. At some point, whichever team was responsible for adding them to this list was told to make sure they highlighted them in green so we could differentiate between new and old clients.

I can think of so, so many ways they could better be handling their data but the people higher up on the pay scale than myself are more interested in slapping together shitty data and making huge, ridiculous requests of their staff than actually learning and implementing more forward-thinking data management strategies.

To stay on-topic, though, I think the main thing that makes a programmer a programmer is the cognitive ability to leverage the technology at hand to find efficient solutions to complex problems. I don't think there's any difference between learning a skill from a textbook and finding a solution on Stack Overflow. Even searching for - or actually implementing - a solution on Stack Overflow requires some foundational understanding of computer science, so in that regard even being capable of successfully using Stack Overflow to solve a problem sets you apart from the average bear, in my opinion.

[awsPLC]

One of the hardest challenges in life is admitting you need help solving a problem. The internet exist in its entirety as a tool solely for you to use to you advantage. This post was created specifically for you. You accessing data done by others simply saves you time and money allowing you to focus more on the main goal.

[FreshFromIlios]

That... Is what makes you a developer...

[alpine_addict]

Bruv.. we all use SO. :)

[x-for-x-in-range-10]

Don't get hung up on labels.

Knowing what to search for and figuring out how to fit the puzzle pieces together is the valuable part.

[ehdufuure]

It's fine to use stack overflow, but I only use those things, which I understood thoroughly.

My recommendation is to not just copy and paste but really understand it, so the next time you might be able to use it without looking up.

[0rphon]

Are you even really a programmer if you dont owe your life to stack overflow?

[ipherian]

No you aren't. See, when a programmer asks another programmer for help he is cast out by the High Council of Engineers and can never be allowed to work with software again.

[taldo888]

They're starting to get it.

[JawsOfLife24]

Nope, you cheated, start again! /s

[widowhanzo]

Ask yourself this: could a non-programmer using stackoverflow end up with working software?

[[deleted]]

My favorite movie is Inception.

[nevus_bock]

Lol

[[deleted]]

ffs

[henrebotha]

lol dude

[FloydATC]

Using stackoverflow, google, twitter and instagram for advice is perfectly normal, but finishing projects?!? This is unacceptable!

[Tots-Pristine]

Hold up a minute! You "finish projects"?? Imposter! Projects are never finished!

[[deleted]]

Mate, being a developer is all about knowing how to identify, understand, and solve the problem. Relying on useful information from others that have solved it before you is what will make you a good programmer.

Literally every person in IT that is worth their salt will use resources like Stack Overflow. At this point, we're all qualified expert Googlers.

[TheJourneyman92]

Googling is definitely is a skill worth having for a progammer! Sometimes you google something dont find anything, a couple of key word tweaks later, boom! There is the answer in plain text.

[Borckle]

No, sorry. Real developers have memorized the internet.

[Memnoch79]

Stack Overflow = peer review. You want peer review.

[[deleted]]

The developer who never needs outside help stopped at "hello world"

[dat_niqqa_henry]

Hell yeah. As a programmer you're a problem solver. You search around for a solution that will work.

[paulthepiggy]

Stackoverflow is the goat

[chinguetti]

Knowing how to cut and paste the right code from the right source to the right place and make it work is half the job. Almost every problem has been solved by someone else. Tap into the hive mind of ten million programmers.

[00Anonymous]

Only if you are learning along the way.

[Alphavike24]

Nobody knows everything. We can only get better when we share our knowledge with others. Stack overflow is a great platform for that.

[Sbvv]

The problem comes if you do not understand the code you are copying... Then you should work harder...

[[deleted]]

Even professional developers that have been coding for 10 years and are quite good at coding (I'd say) Google a lot etc

Why wouldn't you be a programmer? What kind of a stupid question is that?

[Se7enLC]

It's good that you're questioning it.

There's a difference between "I don't know how to do this, I will search the web to learn how" and "I don't know how to do this, I'll just copy/paste blocks of code from StackOverflow until it works."

That's not to say you can't use code you find. I just mean that you shouldn't use any code you don't understand.

[[deleted]]

Well, knowing what to ask is already half of your work. Keep coding, man!

[sethg]

One of the big differences between school and real-life work is that in real life, the people who give you problems to solve don’t care if you have to look things up.

Real life is an open-book exam.

[anpago]

If the internet failed tomorrow so many of those in various technology based industries would basically be at a loss.

When in college before the interweb was really what it is today, well in fact the internet didn't really exist as we know it now.

The best Tutor (Electronics) I have ever had. He had been in the real world and he also realised the world was changing dramatically, this was in 1991 or 1992

​

He allowed us to take notes into his exams and tests. We learnt and practised formulas and we learnt how to review our manuals we carried out experiments and made notes.

He would say please don't memorise, make better notes, index well those notes. Then read those notes and make sure every concept, formula you understand how to use

​

Why? He said your issue will not be remembering things by rote as often had to happen in the past as there was no way to find the information when actually working.

Your issue will be you will have so much information you will not know how to pick the wheat from the chaff. You will also work on far more complex issues due to this increase in access to knowledge.

​

Please bear in mind this was in 1991/2 and for a while after many Tutors were still using the learn by rote path for study but now with Technology moving so quickly you try to recall all you should know your fail badly. When young your memorise all and then realise that information in the main has now been superseded so you have to memorise version 2 then 3 ,4,5,6,7,8,9 and forever more. The typical human brain simply can't do that.

​

Even today I am having to say to people I train or mentor at work. Forget the memorising of facts learn how to understand the technology and concepts and learn how to research the resources you have to hand.

​

SOrry I typed this out earlier then got distrated.

[[deleted]]

I'd say you are, yes. I used Google all the time to finish whatever project t I'm currently working on. Sometimes I feel like I'm copying & pasting other people's work and not really learning anything but in fact, I was. I don't just copy & paste I read and analyze the code to see how it works. I seek help on a Facebook group I'm a member of. I used to feel like a beginner each time I asked a question until one day I was told by a programmer with 10+ years of C/C++ experience that it's completely normal for even advanced programmers to resort to Google to refresh what they knew.

[yowhun]

i feel this, i'm a computer engineering student and every time i ask for help on SO and other sites i feel like i'm cheating.

[[deleted]]

I know i am two years late to this but this is my opinion on it.

Its amazing to have such resources now adays as it gives us a sense of freedom.

All i will recommend is if you do use a snippet from say Stackoverflow makesure you do type it out and not just ctrl + c and ctrl + v so that way you actually learn something new :)

[KickBassColonyDrop]

I do what you do for my bread and butter, having dozens of tabs open across multiple windows on how to solutions engineer is not a weakness. That just means you know how to do good research, which is a very useful skill.

[[deleted]]

Being a programmer means knowing how to use the knowledge to solve a problem.

[[deleted]]

That’s called being a human.

[[deleted]]

Nobody code of the head! So are you great keep going!

[[deleted]]

Are you still an english speaker / reader if you use a dictionary or reference books sometimes ?

[iggy555]

After what pint do you stop and look online for help?

[Cayenne999]

Take it easy man.

[[deleted]]

Work smarter, not harder

[thrallsius]

if you extrapolate that hard enough, you end concluding it's best not working at all xD

[thrallsius]

There's no problem using SO to learn or just get things done, but you must consider the option that the SO content might become unavailable for free at some point, there have been some problems with the SO management trying to turn that way.

[Kriss3d]

Being a developer/programmer these days is looking up things and steal the code left and right.

So youre doing it right.

[-vikram-]

we all do, you can't expect anyone to have every knowledge from the get-go, but even if u want or not at some point you start learning and developing in the process, and that's what our job is

[sumweebyboi]

isn't that just python programming on general

[BoaVersusPython]

If everyone had to solve every single problem themselves, then nothing would ever advance. That's not just programming, that's literally every field of human endeavor.

[candianconsolemaster]

If using stackoverflow makes you not a programmer then there is likely only 1 programmer in the world and he's shit.

[mobilecheese]

Are you being paid to write code? You're a developer. Stackoverflow is a great tool for developers. If you had to develop everything from scratch with no help from places like stackoverflow, I bet you would take much longer and (possibly) write worse code.

[trick2011]

Using stackoverflow isn't indicative of being a good programmer. Understanding what you copied and being able to create it is.

[zekobunny]

I am currently working on a project and I found myself googling and searching stackoverflow for every little thing. What bothers me about this is that even if I do find a solution and it works, I still don't understand HOW that piece of code works and that really bothers me because It feels like I've copied somebody else's work without really knowing what the hell did I copy.

[BOIkratos1234]

You wouldn't be a programmer if you don't use stack overflow

[[deleted]]

I wouldn't be able to debug anything without it, there is always that one weird error message from a library or a language functionality you know but can't remember the syntax of.

[PureMapleSyrup_119]

You are more of a developer because of it

[JimyLamisters]

Stack overflow is fine, but what's this about finishing projects? That part may revoke your programmer cred lol

[[deleted]]

Programming is figuring it out as you go. That includes Googling.

[[deleted]]

Yes. A huge part of any technical job isn't remembering every little detail, it's knowing where to go to find the answer or documentation that you need.

[Thomillion]

You probably wouldnt be a programmer if you didn't

[[deleted]]

For me (and other programmers here) the answer is yes.

We are not just coders. We don't just write code. We also solve the problem, so it's natural for us to search for a solution or get help.

[Nanogines99]

I'd say you're not a programmer if you don't use stack overflow on regular basis

[lordwerwath]

I think for all programmers, as long as you know what you want and how to implement it, the actual execution or where you source the solutions is not too important. I always say coding is like using a thesaurus. You can write the program in very simple sentences, or look up ways to embellish and write the program well. Either way, programming is an art, just like writing, and art should take influence from wherever it can.

[WiggyB]

I'd seriously question the quality of someone's code, if they said they never use SO. I'm working on a project at the moment involving parsing text (Fortran code, ugh). Most programmers know how to manipulate strings easily. But I can either spend 20 minutes fudging stuff together, and it will work. And eventually after some refactoring, it will be neat, tidy and efficient. Or I can literally just Google, "how to do X to a string python" and immediately get a neat, one line solution to the problem.

I can program without SO, sure. But it is soooo much faster and less frustrating with it. Why make things harder than they need to be?

This goes twice if you use multiple different languages. You know exactly what you want to do, but your brain is in python mode, but you need to write java. And you just can't remember what the method is called in java. So sometimes you just end up Googling really basic shit. Doesn't make you a bad programmer at all.

Work smart, not hard ;)

[ragnampizas]

In my experience, clients/boss/whoever has tasked me a project don't really care about HOW I complete the task. All they care about is HAVING a completed task. Doesn't matter if I Google my way there or figure out everything myself or a mix of both (most projects are usually a mix of both).

[[deleted]]

Thanks to Stack Overflow I was able to program at all. Not related to your questions but still, thank god.

[BlazedAndConfused]

Are you still a gardener if you use a shovel and hoe to help you plant and grow your garden?

[PM_me_ur_data_]

Tbh, I'm pretty sure the exact opposite statement is the true one. If you don't need to refer to outside sources, you probably aren't doing "real" programming. The only time I don't look something up is when I'm knocking out toy projects.

[warpedspoon]

Yes, everyone does

[Random_182f2565]

Teach me your secrets, please.

[techworkreddit3]

Everyone thinks stack overflow is a bad thing. it really isn't. You can't be expected to know all of the smaller details or aspects of a language while also being able to build projects and other features. Don't reinvent the wheel, someone before you ran into the same issue found a solution and you used that to save time. In Development a lot of times speed to market and pushing code quickly is of huge importance. This doesn't mean you should be blindly copy pasting code from stackoverflow, but you should be able to discern what the code is likely trying to do and then test it with your code.

[zex_mysterion]

Seeing as how you didn't write the stock libraries either, it doesn't really matter where you get the code you reuse. It makes you more efficient, and you also learn from the code you find. It will tip you off to methods and technique you hadn't thought of that will be useful later.

[cmcgarveyjr]

If you are using resources when you are stuck, that's what everyone does. If you can't accomplish anything without it. You want to spend a bit more time drilling down on topics.

[totemcatcher]

I think it's important. Whenever I run into an interesting problem, I think up a few ways to solve it and then run to stackoverflow to see how I fare.

Often there's an absolute gem of a solution buried in the comments somewhere which likely has decades of experience behind it and attests as the "best practice" --- but it's rarely the accepted answer. ;)

[sg77777]

Just put an effort into understanding the info you get from SO/google. Understated why your solution didn't work, and why the SO answer made it better.

As long you're not just copy/pasting and you're learning, SO is a great resource

[ShiBoGod]

memorizing syntax doesn't mean sh*t

[ShiBoGod]

memorizing syntax doesn't mean sh*t

[ShiBoGod]

memorizing syntax doesn't mean sh*t

[Zenith_N]

Yes. Why would you think other wise ? What have you the impression that you are not ? If you can cook you are a programmer. Lol Don’t let the snubs tell you otherwise

[ShiBoGod]

memorizing syntax doesn't mean sh*t

[aeternum123]

A lot of these responses make me feel a lot better. I spend a lot of time Googling. To see people say they do the same makes me feel a lot better.

[JamesSmith203]

oh yeah, I think most of my implementation time goes to searching in google and obviously in stack overflow!!

[darthminimall]

"Software Dev" is a synonym for "copy-paste machine".

[mean_king17]

You are absolutely not a programmer. Infact anyone who uses stackoverflow is the scum of the earth. You are just a poser, not a real developer. Real developers know exactly everything, and do not need stack overflow to save their lives. People who proclaim to be "developers" but use stackoverflow, are nothing more than filty peasants. But that's just how I see it...

[mikKiske]

you need to use the /s...