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Development without Internet Access

While flying to Austin for sxsw, I had a small programming task. Take a string of a few search terms, break it apart and highlight those terms in another string. It’s a straightforward task, and probably a wheel that’s been reinvented thousands of time in the history of computer science. I approached it as an exercise, to see if I could add another squeaky wheel to the pile. My goal was to do it without using any 3rd party code or any resources. I had no access to documentation, google, stack overflow, or any of the other resources I use constantly to get my job done every day.

The code that I produced was bloated, naive, and horribly inefficient (I suspect). While writing it, i knew I wasn’t really on the right path. When I got back to New York, I took a look at it, and more or less decided I had wasted my time. Then I realized I had written it on a plane, and had nothing better to do. I simply got myself into the zone, and wanted to work through a problem until it was solved. After I got over my initial disgust, I wondered what aside from boredom and stubbornness had prompted me to complete the task.

I never really came to any conclusions until a few days later. I was going about my day normally, fixing bugs, writing emails, troubleshooting. As I hit a hard spot, something I couldn’t figure out, I gave up staring at the code, and turned to Google. Then I came across a builtin php function that was giving me a strange result. After puzzling for a few seconds, I dropped the function into Google. A little while later, I was examining the results of an EXPLAIN statement in MySQL, and the output was something I hadn’t seen before. I found the answer on StackOverflow a few minutes later.

Then it dawned on me. Maybe I don’t actually have the skills to be a web developer, and I’ve faked it all these years. Maybe I don’t know all that much about MySQL, and perhaps I only know enough about Linux to cause problems for Rackspace. Whether or not that’s true, I did realize that I’m pretty good at finding solutions to problems from the collective experiences, wisdom, and flames of the Internet. Maybe it’s not entirely fair to say that I faked my way through several years of a career. After all the code that I’ve put together over the years to answer various questions, or sift through or collect data serves a purpose, performs relatively well, and is serving people everyday. Also, that disgusting snippet of string highlighting code works pretty well, despite that fact that I hate its face and want it to die.

After I got myself out of my existential development funk, more questions came to mind. First, how the F did anyone get any answers to tough questions before the Internet? Secondly, how did programmers back in the day find any sort of direction? Books on technology and programming are great, don’t get me wrong, but you can’t get answers to complicated questions. After having these thoughts crop up, I spent a little bit of time looking over other devs’ shoulders at the office. What I saw was very reassuring, as the Google machine was often hard at work for the rest of the team. The php site, StackOverflow, and QuirksMode were in browsers constantly.

Which begs yet another question: what exactly does it take to be a web programmer? Based on my experience, it seems to boil down to an Internet connection, Google, tenacity to the point of stupidity, and decent search skills. To back up even further, is it possible to take on a job you know nothing about, and learn how do it via the Internet?

Published Jun 11, 2011

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