I Take the Internet For Granted
December 5th, 2007
I hate grocery shopping but I love Starbucks and my computer so while Steph goes shopping at Meijer, I sit in the cafe and enjoy a non-fat latte while hacking away. One point of interest is that the Starbucks has no wifi. What this has made me aware of is how much I use the internet while coding. What is the name of that function? What was that bookmark on Ma.gnolia? What was that feed I just read on Google Reader? I am constantly installing gems, searching for code snippets and looking up documentation while I code.
Whenever I run into a small problem, I Google it and I take the internet for granted. I continue in this pattern until I find myself without a beloved internet connection. It is then that I realize I don’t really know that much. I mean, what do I really know? I guess the answer to that question would be, Google.
Not a problem has arose that I have been unable to find a solution for, using the right keywords on Google. Noticing this tonight, as I sipped on my latte, it got me thinking. How ineffecient would I be if I had to code without the internet? Granted, I am a web developer, so at some point I would need the internet to deploy my work, but what would happen if each time I buried my nose in TextMate, I disconnected from the net.
Would I struggle for weeks until desperation forced me to turn it back on? Would I start to challenge my own brain for solutions instead of quickly finding and implementing a solution someone has blogged about? Would I begin to think outside the box and come up with innovative solutions to problems? Or, would I repeat everyone else’s mistakes when a simple search could have enlightened me? I don’t know. Got me thinking though.
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It’s an interesting point.
When I was at school (the British kind, i.e. junior high and high) we were always having to memorise great chunks of Latin vocabulary, trigonometric expansions, etc. It was painful — but I was amazed how helpful it was to have all this fundamental information just ‘there’ in my brain.
I think I’ve grown lazy with my broadband connection. I waste time every day looking up the same facts over and over again (e.g. how do you do a zero-width negative lookahead in a regexp). If I learned all this by heart I would be far more productive. And then I could leave my internet connection on knowing that I’d only use it for obscure error messages and longer Ruby idioms.
Oh dear. I’ve just reasoned myself into some hard work :)
…Why remember anything you can look up? … ever… I can’t add any extra GB to my head and it’s a finite amount of space.
it is a little bit strange to me, sitting hours and hours at my computers and searching for information in the web everyday because of my jobs. i couldn’t do my work without the net and i’m very glad, that there are people who share their informations with others (like you do). so i say thank you to you. my homepage is one result of your wonderful work “how to nail a sexy layout”. it is the first page i created in my life and i have not understood all things in it, but so i will learn.
but sometimes i’m longing for nature - trees, air, ocean - without any computer reachable. there’s a great change in our societies. i hope my grandchildren will learn about nature and be thankfull of it.
lovely greatings from germany, inka
Interesting idea. It sounds a lot like kids having calculators in Calculus. It’s important for the kids to 1) have the knowledge of how to do equations, but 2) it’s also important that kids aren’t bogged in actually *doing* the equations, preventing them from moving along and learning new applications. So, the fine line is balancing knowledge of how and why with efficiency.
It’s the same concept with writers and style guidelines. Or historians and encyclopedias. Taking the idea offline, how efficient would you be as an astrophysicist if you constantly referenced a set of encyclopedias, math books, and publications for every single detail of your daily work?
The internet can very easily be a crutch, in this way, because the barrier of use is so low. But it’s kind of a DRY thing… even though it may take literally a second to find the return value of an Array method on Google, how efficient are you really if you look it up each time you use it?
For your purposes, perhaps a mitigating concept would be: “If I’ve looked this up twice in my recollection, I need to memorize this idea cause I’m really wasting time.”
Just a few 1-cup-coffee thoughts.
@Jon - Great point. Thanks for the comment.
Its an interesting point, and one Ive considered recently whilst applying for new jobs.
After a few years in Web Development / Design, I thought I knew enough to cruise through most interviews without a problem. It was only when I sat down to my first “test” that I realised just how much I rely on Google. Thats not to say I know nothing, but all those little functions where you know what they do but can’t think what they’re called or the exact syntax - Google is always there to save the day.
That said, i think its a bit of a moot point for a commercial developer. The chances of finding yourself in a situation where you’re building a web app and don’t have any sort of web access is getting less and less likely. After my home internet connection went down one night recently, I found myself using mobile.google.com for the things I was getting stuck on! Thankfully I already had the PHP documentation installed locally, so I only needed to jump on a couple of times - but the fact is, the option is always there!
But… I know what you mean. I hate to think how productive I’d become if I had no access whatsoever to Googles index throughout an entire project.
get some EVDO from sprint or verizon and plug it into your notebook. problem solved :)
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Right?! I don’t code but I use the internet the same way when I’m writing. I am constantly looking things up to figure out what to say about them, or because I reminded myself of something I wanted to read, or to reference them correctly, or just because I am distracting myself from what I need to write :)
Also, if you hate grocery shopping, you might be interested in the business I just started! I send people a weekly box with a suggested meal plan, recipes, and groceries, so all they have to do is cook. You should check it out! http://fortydollargourmet.com/peacemeals