Dear new developer,

Searching is important to writing and understanding software. Less so for giving you a base of knowledge. For that, I’d seek out books, video classes or side projects, depending on how you learn. Googling well is tough if you don’t know what terms to use. (I’ll use google as a synonym for a generic search. I’ll address issues of other search engines below.) Once you have a firm base of knowledge and understand software jargon, you can stand on the shoulders of giants.

Tips for searching:

• Google the exact error message (almost). When you get an error message like nginx_1 | 2019/01/06 20:42:22 [crit] 11#11: *1 connect() to unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock failed (13: Permission denied), don’t just cut and paste it into the search box. Look at the error message, and see what is unique to your situation. For the error message above, text like the nginx instance name, nginx_1, and the date and time, 2019/01/06 20:42:22, are unique to my installation. Searching on them won’t be useful. But the message text starting with connect() looks like it will be far more common and will likely yield good results.
• Read the results, whether forum post or documentation, carefully. I’ve been bitten by this more times than I care to remember. But it’s very easy, when you find a stack overflow, forum or other result that seems to apply, to just cut and paste the top answer as quickly as possible and get back to what you were doing before you started searching. This is the quick path, but the better choice is to read the entire page and make sure that they are addressing the same issue that you are trying to address. You also want to pick the best solution (which may not be the first one, especially if the page is old). Sometimes newer libraries or releases have different paths forward, and so you should try to map the software you are working in to the one that the page refers to. The other reason to scan the entire page is that it will give you a sense of the different solutions. The underlying goal of doing the search is to incorporate the knowledge into your understanding so that you won’t have to do this Google search in the future (you may have to search in your project or commit log, but that’s quicker than redoing a google search, especially months from now). Trying to understand all the solutions and what they are doing is a way to be a just in time learner. Mindlessly copying the solution isn’t.
• Add links to what you find in your commits and your comments. Do this especially if the solution is complicated or esoteric. You should of course write a commit message that explains your intent, but adding in the link can give additional context.
• Think about the terms you use in the query. This is where foundational knowledge comes in. For example, if you know that active record is an object relational mapping tool, or that ruby is a dynamic language where every class can change another (which is called “monkey patching”) then you can know how to google for things related to these concepts. If you want to change a specific active recrod behavior, you might google “how to monkypatch active record” which will get you far more focused results than “how do change the rails database system”. This ca be iterative. Pay attention to the terms used in posts you find, and use them in new queries.
• Consider using an alternate search platform. I use duckduckgo.com as my default search engine. Frankly, it’s not as good as Google, but it gives answers I need in about 75% of the searches, and I can easily run the same search on Google if I need it. I am supporting an alternative search ecosystem that will be better for the internet in the long run.

A last point is important enough that I’m going to break it out. Google, and search engines in general, work well because there’s content out there produced by people. You can take part in producing that content, either by adding to stackoverflow (which can be as simple as just voting an answer up or down–after you’ve tried the solution out), writing a blog post or responding to that forum post. If you encounter an issue no one has ever seen before, write it up, like I did here. This participation in the wider internet is crucial for the continuing useful functioning of the internet. So, participate in some way and give back.

 

Using Google to solve problems lets you leverage the hive mind for your development work. Don’t just use it. Use it well.

Sincerely,

Dan