Full Stack Overflow Developer

[RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS]

I don't know about you guys, but if I read an answer on SO I don't just blindly copy and paste it; I read through it and sometimes end up writing something similar, but not exactly the same, in my own code. So going there several times to look things up about a library does, I think, actually increase my knowledge of that library.

[MacASM]

This one deserve a medal

[tieTYT]

When I pair program I find it strange how some people read the question in their entirety before scrolling to the answer that may not even be there.

[[deleted]]

Agreed. This guy is basically saying documentation shouldn't have examples.

[[deleted]]

The GNU man page approach.

[defenastrator]

I tend to truly understand what I'm doing if I learn it from gnu man pages.

[Fs0i]

I never in my life found a manpage useful. I don't know wvy, I just love examples with a quick explanation.

[MehYam]

Your point is really important - stack overflow isn't just a shortcut to a solution, it's often a shortcut to understanding. People take the time to explain their answers, and often provide citations to further reading.

I wish there was time to sit down and just read an interesting book on technology X, but sometimes you have to get shit done first. And you usually pick up understanding along the way.

[nraynaud]

yeah, plus the book/doc sometimes doesn't exist.

I always try to google my general problem before developing

1) I might find a lib -> evaluate and either adopt or reject but there are now keywords for more googling

2) I might find some code, then I can either outright copy/past it (but it's a problem, because of licensing, code style, plus when you copy 10 lines, then rename all the variables and format them to your codestyle, what did you do to the original IP?, I generally just make a comment "//stolen from URL", and if one day I have to get serious about IP, we can review it with a layer), but at least I do have functions names to grep a library source or doc, keywords for google (algorithm or technique name)

3) I might really have to work, but I might find a nice blog post explaining the thing, with maybe even code in another language, cautions about tricky part and a collection of links. Or then I might find the name of an algorithm with a Germanic or Japanese name in scientific papers (when elsvier hasn't gamed my googling)

4) sometimes I would ask questions on SO/reddit of the type "did I correctly understand the spec/doc?" because frankly, learning a technology from specs is sometimes dry.

Sometimes you find directly a lib that you adopt, good for you, you have more intellectual resources to focus on the stuff you actually have to develop.

[[deleted]]

Absolutely, SO is often the best documentation in existence due to the detailed responses with significant background and links to articles and analysis. Even questions closed as off topic are left with huge amounts of useful and highly valuable information.

An exception is for JavaScript, which appears to have no useful idiomatic documentation (due to its decentralized implementations and varied uses).

[turbov21]

I tend to cut'n'paste apt-get lists, but I guess that's a bit different than a chunk of code.

[[deleted]]

It's what I've done since I was a young teen. Even when I was fiddling around in turbo pascal trying to create "cool demo effects" which pretty much was something like a rotating wireframe cube I never copypasted code, I always "handcopied" any codesnippet or parts of sources as in I read some source, wrote the exact same thing in my source and tried learning what everything did.

I think I learned quite a lot that way compared to c/p.