I’m Not the Only Developer for Whom This Isn’t Éasy

I sincerely hope that I’m not the only one who doesn’t know what they’re doing.

I’m not the only one who uses tenacity and grit in order to perform as a software developer. That means I’ve come up with a series of processes that help me to get things done, despite my own idiocy.

A-cute accent shortcuts

It’s not just looking up accents that have me reaching to Google for help.

I’m terrible at remembering shortcuts. Or spellings.

I’m the type of software developer who looks up spellings on Google even though I have a spellcheck built into my IDE. I know, I’m destroying the world with my disgusting behavior, please tell me that in the comments.

Regex

People at work think I can “do a Regex”. I can’t, it’s all written by ChatGPT.

I suspect no living human can do that stuff anyway.

Docker

Oh, Docker. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve Googled “Stop and remove all Docker containers”.

This is one of those things I’ve done dozens of times, and yet it feels like the equivalent of forgetting your own birthday (although nobody cares about my birthday, of course).

Stack Overflow as Copilot

Many of my solutions are from Stack Overflow answers posted in 2014. I probably should be ashamed of that, but I’m not. Where else do you find the exact solution to a problem, without having the inconvenient issue of needing to speak to someone.

The hunt for the relevant thread is its own meta-game, and when you find the solution that saves hours of time that rush is just something else.

I tend not to answer questions on Stack Overflow anymore, as I spend much of my spare time writing stuff on Medium but maybe one day I’ll go back to berating juniors. 

We’ll see.

Conclusion

The truth is I’ve a hundred tabs open, right now on my work machine. When anyone sees that they think I’m looking things up but that’s not true.

They are tabs for things I have looked up and a cover for not really working. Anyway, I digress.

The message I want to get across is that coding isn’t about being perfect of knowing everything off the top of your head. Rather software engineering is about knowing patterns and when to apply those patterns.

If I’m using Google and Stack Overflow as a pattern to solve problems, then so what? There isn’t any shame in that.

So next time you write “how to center a div in CSS” don’t worry. We’re all doing it.

Oh, if you’ve got a shortcut for the é please drop me a note in the comments. Thanks!