who else winds up going to Github to look for examples when trying to learn,
rather than just read documentation written by dry, left brainers who
couldnt teach a rock to fall?
Discussion
Where you find coding answers is a function of expertise.
When you first start learning, Stack Overflow will have your exact question and a perfect answer.
Then youâll find that people have only asked similar questions, so you have to piece together a solution from multiple partial answers.
As you level up, youâll find less on Stack Overflow, and you start to have to read API documentation and specifications.
When that fails, you read code. Declarations, then implementations. And if youâre hard pressed, decompiled binaries.
Itâs not a straight line of course, and youâll often be at different levels for different projectsâor even different parts of the same project.
The important thing to remember is that as a programmer, youâll never know what youâre doing. Once youâve solved some programming problem, you never have to solve the same problem again because the code already exists.
The difference between an expert and a novice isnât that the expert knows what theyâre doing. Itâs that the expert doesnât know what theyâre doing at a higher level.
wow you're so wise
I'm a technical writer by trade. đ
A LOT of #documentation needs a lot of help.
I'd like to get the point where I can freely send surprise pull requests that fixes it, like someone would just wake up and find it all spiffed up and ready to merge.
I felt your post deeply. Bad documentation is bad for the world.