Ask an Expert: Levelling Up & How to Google with Mike from HTML All The Things

[Music] hello it is time for another jingling noise and another scrimba live stream how exciting is that i see some excitement already in the chat and with good reason because i'm joined today by mike from html all the way all the things podcasts plus that deserves a round of applause who as you can see from the letters on the screen will be talking to us all about how to google and level up your tech career exciting yeah thanks for joining us mike no problem glad to be here been a fan of the show for a little while actually it's great to hear yeah lovely lots of people here and people have already started doing our weekly well more than weekly actually survey which is this uh if i can find the overlay if you are new here please put a rabbit in the chat and if you've been before put a tiger we don't use this information it's just to amuse ourselves so yes plenty of tigers already in the chat exciting oh i've got an echo really maybe i'm using the wrong mic and we'll have a look into it it's all good it says it's the right one so i will crack on and hope it's just your sound system mr echo reporter yes so mike and someone in the chat earlier on said here it is how to google is a developer's superpower would you agree with that i 100 agree with that i think i i've i've ran into this a lot and we'll talk about it throughout this live stream but i ran into the hesitancy to admit that you google a lot and it's always been kind of shocking to me because obviously like for me i've been a developer for seven plus years now i google all the time right like even very simple things like a for loop for instance sometimes will just slip out of my mind yeah i don't care because it's it's one google away maybe three seconds of my time to find it if you know how to google properly so i think for sure googling is like the extension of your storage capacity of your brain right so knowing how to do that can save you so much space that's a reserve for other more important things like when to use a certain syntax and stuff like that like when to use a for loop or an if statement just going basic terms but regardless those are more important than how to actually implement it yeah i completely agree i have certain things that just do not stick in my mind no matter how many times i use them it drives me mad but they are just a google away as you say um i think you've kind of answered this one in a way but are there any other reasons why googling skills are so valuable yes uh i think with google with googling skills it's not only about like memory retention and stuff like that the other things you can kind of do with it is expand on a concept so for instance let's say you're trying to implement a i'm going to always speak in simple terms because i don't know the level of the audience like a for loop right and it's it's you're iterating over an array initially your thought process could be like hey i'm just gonna use a for loop that's how i did it three years ago that's how i'm gonna do it now but as you google you're actually going to find other ways that you can do that like a for each an array operator for this we're speaking in javascript terms other languages obviously have them too but you're you're going to find better ways to do things so as you kind of hone your skills and stop looking for the easiest and fastest solution you're also going to start looking for the best solution and you're going to and it's going to evolve over time because three years ago maybe the for loop was the way to do it three like now if you google it you're gonna get the more accurate answer of you know the four each that is a really good point actually if you never googled anything then i guess you'd only be using the technology you originally learned and you wouldn't keep it up to date i didn't think of that yeah deadjet says my memory capacity is 256 bytes i can relate to that completely regarding the echo it was playing in discord as well so that's why not my fault that is good to hear yeah so mike can you run us through what a good google strategy would look like absolutely so one thing that i've actually done recently and this isn't exactly part of the google strategy is i will actually refer to documentation before i go to google um so the first thing i do when i run into an issue or when i need to implement something like let's say i'm working in view or something like that is i'll actually check the view documentation first to see the way that they want you to do it and if i don't find something there then i go to google and this is where the kind of strategy begins i start really specific so if i'm trying to implement something like a or or i'm having issues with something like a div not not being able to be hidden in v like while i'm programming in view i'll definitely include like hiding i can't hide a div in the google search but i'll also add view to that because that's the technology i'm working with and what that allows what that allows us to do is get give you a view specific answer because there's obviously many ways that you can hide a div you can use doc you know document.getelementbyid and hide it someway you can uh just erase it from the dom in like there's plenty of ways you can do that but when you're using a technology or a framework it's important to kind of add those to your google searches to get as specific an answer as you can initially but a lot of the times as everyone obviously knows you're not going to get the answer right away so you start taking away terms so if you don't find the answer for whatever reason now in my case in my example obviously you're going to find the answer but you might have a more specific example where you have like some sort of a database that you're using and a front end like node and and then a front end of view and you don't know where the problem lies so start removing one of those technologies one by one and seeing if you can find a more general answer which will then lead you to kind of implement a more general solution so that's my very basic google strategy obviously for every little thing like learning new things troubleshooting there's completely different ones but i like to again documentation first specific query for second and then a more broad query interesting on the documentation how or do you have any tips for how you might find something as specific as that because i find a lot of documentation quite impenetrable to be completely honest um is control or command f your only option or do you have any other tips so there's some really good documentations out there that have amazing searches uh tailwind just comes to mind views documentation is actually very good stuff like that but barring searches really and this is why i always go back and tell people to understand the basics before they get into the more complex stuff if you understand what conditional rendering is if you understand what uh the certain terms are of like a we're talking front-end frameworks here then when you have an issue in that specific spot it's going to be a lot easier for you to go to the documentation and be like okay conditional rendering oh i found it here and then just read up and down between the conditional rendering kind of section right so for instance svelte documentation i really like it but it doesn't have a search so what i do with felt's documentation is i just kind of try to use my skills as much as possible to narrow down in which section it's going to be and then i control f like you like you were saying yeah so it all kind of boils down to having that base understanding before you kind of get into the nitty-gritty as it were yeah that makes sense justice has an interesting question which also came to my mind i'm worried about googling too because i don't think i'll be able to rely on it in interviews and i do know that some interviews don't allow googling presley what's your take on those interviews and secondly how can we tackle such an interview so i think first of all interview discussion could be a whole other episode in itself because i have a lot of takes on the interview discussion but i i don't like interviews especially coding interviews that don't allow you to google i think that that is you're you're asking someone to again memorize syntax which is a useless skill you're bogging them down in a very strange metric and you're not actually getting the real developer power from them so you're not seeing what they're actually going to be like in real life it's just like in exams in school and you're not able to you know use your calculator or something obviously in the industry you're going to be able to use that kind of stuff in a job you're going to be able to use google so it's best for the interviewer and the company to be able to see how they utilize the tools available to them during the actual job now if you're coding in like the sahara desert with no internet i don't know i don't know if that's a thing like if you're interviewing for a company that doesn't have internet connection in certain areas and you've got a code on the fly maybe there's some valid you know reason for that but other than that that crazy situation i don't think there's any reason for a company not to allow google and when you are in an interview and google is allowed absolutely show how you would get to the solution because that's for me like i've interviewed quite like a few people i love to see a person's troubleshooting strategy i love to see how a person gets to an answer and even if they don't get to an answer that insight into like the the strategies you take because i you know when you're when you're an interviewer you know that it's a high stress situation so sometimes the person's not going to get to the answer but if you show your techniques at least then they can see like okay well there's something to work with there and that might actually get you to the next part yeah super what happens if you do find yourself in one of these interviews where you can't google i mean i can't imagine anything worse personally how can you kind of navigate that so with with interviews i really like to ask a little bit of questions a lot of the times when you get an interview at least in my experience my experience is not super broad on this topic but regardless what the interviewer will say is like these are the topics we're going to be covering or if even in the job description you know this is going to be on react whatever like there's going to be a certain amount of technologies so before an interview that you know is going to be closed book i would very much focus on those technologies now yes you might have to memorize some syntax yes you might have to learn some very complex structures and stuff like that but again this is a one-off so focus on it like it is a test in school learn it like it's a test in school use it like it's a test in school and then i don't want to this is going to be a little bit controversial but forget it like it's a test in school like after because yeah you can't keep all that stuff in your head without you know hindering yourself about the next thing that you want to do yeah no that's a great tip and what about if you do find yourself in a situation where you really can't remember something or maybe you've never seen it before can you do pseudo code i think 100 you should do pseudocode and you should be very vocal in the interview as well i i like i said before the technique that you use to solve a problem is almost as important as actually solving the problem in an interview so when you're stuck on something be vocal and be like oh you know what i haven't done this in a little while you know what i would do i would probably and then like you said pseudocode a little bit and be like i would probably search up this stuff on online try to fill in the pseudocode platform and this is how i would handle that so again be very vocal during the interview process about if you can't google about how you would google because a lot of the times the interviewer themselves will be against the process of not allowing you to google because they're just a cog in the machine and they'll hear your their your method and be like yeah that's what i would do too and kind of push you forward yeah yeah totally interesting question from yobin when googling vanilla javascript google gives me jquery react other libraries yes we've all been there when google gives us a jquery solution is there a way for that to not happen so yeah there there is a way so there's there's a few operators you can try to use but this is not going to work every time so there's some operators like an exclude operator which is just a dash so you can write your javascript question like you know how to how to iterate over an array and do a minus dash jquery right and that will hopefully get you as many results as you they possibly can without jquery in the in the actual answer but a lot of the times really what happens is you'll get a stack overflow article and stack overflow unfortunately and we're going to talk about this a little bit later but stackoverflow has some issues with newer questions so you're going to get a lot of old answers in stack overflow that have jquery in them and that's good jquery is fine i have nothing against jquery to be honest i love jquery for what it gave to the industry now obviously there's better ways to do things but what happens a lot of times in those articles is the first answer is not always going to be the best so scroll down a little bit and you might get a newer answer and usually it'll say updated with emca 2016 or something like that and that will be your kind of your way to go that's for stack overflow and again back to the exclude you can try the exclude first interesting yeah so here's an example of what it would look like from idmx225 so you put minus minus whatever you want yeah very interesting yeah debjit says search is my best friend yeah totally um philippe asks do you prefer writing questions like how to make something or is it better to write the exact term you're looking for example or how to display items array items one by one or rendering of array items so suppose this is kind of asking do you need to use human language with google or is it better to almost google what you expect to see the answer to be uh so i think start with googling what you expect to see the answer to be that's your best bet and that's your best chance of getting the exact answer to your question if you start googling like how to make an array show items they're gonna first of all you're gonna get a million different answers from a million different uh languages so that's gonna be really confusing and you're gonna get different use cases as well of that whereas if you google how to display an array item one by one in javascript you're going to get a much more direct answer to what you're trying to do yeah good tip so circling background to our um search operators the minus one sounds handy are there any others we need to know about or do you have any resources where we can find them so yes i do have a resource let me throw that into the chat right away and then i'll talk about a couple of operators that i do use on a consistent basis i don't use a lot to be honest i have gone gotten decently oh my control c is not working it's from ahrefs oh it might be um i'm not sure you can post links in the chat if you put it in the private chat um i think i should be able to they're in the private chat no problem so the ones the operators that i use are again the exclude operator the minus sign there's also a colon site operator so it's you can search a specific site so if you want to search like only stack overflow and stack overflow search can be kind of spotty you can actually put colon site stack overflow right and you can get to a or i think it's stack overflow inside i can't remember the exact wording but again the the resources on the screen so you can actually only search for your question on stack overflow or any other site if it's uh uh you know the the mdn resources or the w3 schools whatever you want uh the last one that i use more often than not is and so before there was a plus sign for doing like two different keywords together and only showing results for two different keywords that sign has now been deprecated that's kind of a new thing so you can use the capital and so if you want to search for vue and javascript solutions the ones that have both of those terms in the answer then you would use the capital a and d yeah this one's quite interesting it's a wild card so basically if you kind of know everything in the syntax apart from one word you can use this if i've understood correctly yes exactly exactly you want it you if you if you want to match like something between the two and stuff like that so i think the answer there is is uh steve wild card apple yeah whoo there we go look at that who'da thought that's amazing as well yeah yeah wow yeah it could be controversial yeah so that um resource is in the chat once again and i will be checking out definitely after this stream awesome yeah super cool any more questions coming in from the chat it's a good question yeah i think there's one now i made it says jacob this is interesting yeah that is good um yeah so i shall move on my other questions um so if you do all of that and no joy which actually i had recently i didn't think that could ever happen but it did happen to me um what can you do if googling does not solve your problem this this happens honestly it's happened to me many times when the problem is just too specific for you to google like it happens it's just it's just something that will happen as you actually evolve as a developer this will happen more and more to you and you're gonna have to rely on multiple different things so the main one for me and this is something again we'll talk about a little bit more as well is asking for help and this can be done in many different ways one of them is directly asking like a mentor or someone that you know has more experience than you or has someone that you know that has more experience than you than in this specific thing that you're googling right so if it's something like you're you're having issues with a library a library is a very common one that you can't google because if a library is only used by x amount of people then they're probably going to be some issues with you finding the answers right so like a back-end library like sandy.io or strappy or something like that you're using those you run into an issue the best thing to do is ask someone that's already used it but there's multiple other ways one of them is to join a discord or a slack group they have most most like most larger libraries at least have them sanity and strappy do for sure and then the other way is let's say it's a really tiny library and this has happened to me many times like you're trying to implement a i can't even remember what it was some sort of iterator or something like that some sort of very specific thing to your to your task and you just can't get something to work because it doesn't work with x library or whatever you can go into the github of that whatever that library is and post an issue or even search in the issues of that github i found that the search there is really important so one thing that you should 100 do first before you post an issue and to clarify is to search closed and open issues because a lot of the time when you post an issue someone's going to already do that for you and kind of point to them now some people can be really snarky about it which is kind of just you know don't do that don't be snarky just point them to the right one but regardless you're going to be saving time for the people that are actually maintaining the library if you do that so again three different things one is ask someone that's already done it or ask someone that you know that's done it that's not possible sometimes the next thing is try to join a community that is based around these things so slack or or discord or whatever other communities exist and third try to go into the github issues and see if that question's already been asked great tips and on this conveniently i have the link to scrimba's discord community which a couple of people have mentioned in the chat yes come along we have dedicated help channels for various technologies and a general channel if your question doesn't fit into that well that's interesting about um searching github issues yeah so related to that jacob asks have you ever searched github repos for how something like an open source tool has been implemented well example connecting firebase or mongodb it's interesting to see how others code their projects so this is a good point because even if you know the answer to something or know how to do something it might be worth googling anyway i like that i like that idea because you might get a better idea of how to do it i'm running into this currently with a side project that i have where i know how to do certain things but i know that some of the stuff that i'm doing some of the structures some of the code structure isn't industry standard or whatever you want to call it so i will actually go and google the the proper way of doing it now the first thing i do usually again is documentation but like jacob's saying another really great approach is to see if you can find an open source project that has done something similar to what you've done like implementing a firebase tv and stuff like that because what that shows you how to do is again exactly like kind of a way of a different thought process to what you're doing and maybe a more correct one now i say maybe a more correct one because sometimes that can lead you astray if the gift exactly if the github repo has a many stars and everyone's kind of complementing it and people are suggesting it then maybe it's a great one but if the github repo has no action in it it's really difficult to know like is my way better or is they their way better so that's again maybe something that you can ask a discord group maybe something that you can just experiment with maybe something you can reason out yourself hmm yeah that is an interesting point it could be a double-edged sword so watch out michael says oh yes unfortunately this spirals into days of research for me yes a rabbit hole yeah you don't want you want to avoid that you want it to be a quick thing if you're going to be trying to improve every little thing that you're doing in a project you're not going to get a project done so that's just the reality of it so you have to you have to trust your instincts and sometimes your instincts might be a little bit outdated or they might be a little bit non-standard practice but they're still going to get the job done so just get like the most important thing when you're building a side project or a project is to get it done if you're working for a client they're want they want results they don't care that you put this together with the most efficient way possible so that it can work on computers from 20 years ago they just don't care that's the reality of it so don't get bogged down don't go down that rabbit hole too much use it sparingly and just just use it to kind of better yourself a little bit yeah sorry perfect is the enemy of done yes yes so on to my next question now which is when is the right time to ask a question on stack overflow i have never done this not sure i ever would um the reason being is the second part of my question any tips for not getting sarcastic answers on there yeah this one is i have had very limited success in asking a stack overflow question i've asked probably 15 of them and i've had one answer out of those 15 that actually led me to a solution and even that answer was snarky right wow the other 14 were zero responses whatsoever no sorry not the other 14 probably like 12 of those were zero responses and another three were just like people demeaning me essentially saying that this is a stupid question that's been answered a million times without linking to any answer wow so i i'm i'm of the thought that at this point in time stack overflow is a very very good database of how to solve little problems but as a way to actually like expand that database it's very difficult because you have to be really entwined with searching stack overflow to find the correct answer and to find another answer and if you don't do what they want you to do there will be snarky comments i don't know if they're planning on fixing it i know they were just acquired so hopefully there's some sort of plan in place to get that toxicity a little bit out of there like i know my my uh the my podcast partner our business partner he was on stack overflow for a while he actually got some reputation on there but all of a sudden he started like posting questions and there was a certain group of people that were just kind of attacking him every time to the point where they were downloading him specifically so that he couldn't answer any more questions so there's like there's a system in place there that if you're downvoted enough times they'll actually stop you from answering questions and commenting and he got to that point so it's it's a very strange ecosystem again i use it as a resource i do not use it as a way to ask questions anymore that is interesting so caffeinated pixels i think that answers your question of is it ever worth posting a question on stack overflow tom chance says the best time to use stacker over psych overflow is when the flames are licking at your feet and not before however heidi has had a good experience with esso at least half of my questions got good and helpful responses there's got to be people out there that had good experiences right like that's good we found one of them well done interesting philly asks um is there a good alternative for stack overflow for asking questions so that's this is where it comes back to what i was saying before discord groups slacks channels and issues github issues i think github issues is a very very good place to ask questions because if you found something wrong then other people can benefit from that and it's directly in that like co-find in that project and github issues are actually still google like they still index on google so you can google something get a github issue and solve your problem uh which is which is awesome like discord and slack channels unfortunately aren't like databases of answers which kind of sucks because that's what that's the advantage of having a stack overflow but i think anything that tries to compete with stack overflow will eventually become stack overflow if you know what i mean yeah that's a difficult one because if we made a new stack overflow and called it nice overflow yeah maybe you could just permanently ban anyone who was snarky but then that's honestly the people answering questions though that's the thing like those are the people that like they get the reputation and they get that kind of feeling of importance and they are the ones that are driving that community forward it's just it's a difficult one to balance i don't i don't know how to i don't know how to fix it no me neither never mind um moving on does googling have any unexpected side effects good or bad so yes i think i was mentioning this a little bit before one of the one of the things with googling is like you might get a better solution than you were even thinking of and you might advance your career a little bit as you're as you're googling because you're starting to get newer solutions you're starting to get more efficient solutions and you're starting to better yourself you know in a way that you wouldn't have if you were just kind of siloed into your own development environment and just coding with you know three-year-old knowledge the web development industry the development industry in general moves at a ridiculously rapid pace where i always like to say that we're still in the wild west of web development and development in general like there's no standards there's barely any like solid ground to stand on and if you start looking for that ground and if you start basing yourself in there you're gonna get caught behind and again there's nothing wrong with being a little bit behind i think being a year behind is not there's nothing wrong with that being a couple years behind even maybe but as soon as you start getting like a little bit too far and then you need to go into the job sphere you're gonna have you might have some trouble looking for like the more optimal positions there's there's a chance yeah definitely so it can keep you up to date yeah that is good caffeinated pixel says nice overflow sounds like a good day for a plumber well there you go it's a double business idea for someone out there jacob says honestly i haven't heard of html all the things before but you've just gained a new listener great news yeah that's awesome jacob thank you yeah looking forward to that so um with all this googling knowledge you've given us do you have any tips for managing the results of your searches so yeah i have a i have a few tips here i know you have one i'll let you say it at the end and it's actually a really good one i i looked it up after it's called grepper but anyway for me i actually do it differently i have i work with jira a lot with my clients so whenever i google something that's related to a jira ticket and i find the solution i'll actually store that solution that that link in the jira ticket itself because if i ever need to go back and i have that same problem i can search through my jira tickets and find the the problem that i was having and the solution in it so and the other side benefit of that is that if i pass on the project to someone else and they have the same issue i kind of tell them that i do this and they can go back and google it as well so that's one way i do it another way i actually do it is i use bookmarking a lot and just standard bookmarking i don't have any extensions i i clean my bookmarks pretty often and whenever i'm working on something right now like if i'm working on my side project for instance i'll have a separate folder for that side project and anything that i find in like a solution that i find for that side project or an idea or something i'll store it in that folder the bookmark folder and then once when time comes i'll archive it in like an archive folder as well so if i ever need to go back i still have access to it but my bookmarks are kind of still clean so those are the kind of the two ways that i manage it but i do like your way as well i've been kind of looking at it yeah so nice smooth transition there and i recently found out through the scrimba discord community actually about this chrome extension called grepa so what happens with grepo is once you've installed it let's say you need to google uh generate random number js which as you can see i do google a lot you then get the code snippets up top and then you can add your grepa answer in here which i've probably already added this one actually and then um yeah you get some kind of coin i haven't actually figured out what that coin does yet but it's nice anyway um and then you can find all these um various solutions but the main reason i like it is because it kind of hones in on the answer very easily and it's nice and easy to copy and paste so yeah it's a win-win grappa is the name of it i'll put the name of that in the chat thank you to jose for um yeah telling us about it so i would like to know now a little bit about uh the career side of things if that's okay so leveling up your tech career we did have a question earlier on from michael uh larocca but it's way up in the chat so michael if you wouldn't mind copying and pasting your question i will now ask it um but in the meantime i will ask i didn't catch that siri in the meantime siri will be quiet and i will ask mike how can people level up their junior coding skills this is a great question uh i get asked this quite often so if you're already a junior developer let's say we're putting in that mindset because it's different for every stage of your career if you're a junior developer honestly the best way you can level up your skills is to start building projects in your site like side projects in your time the time that you have because you can take courses sure there's nothing really wrong with that you can take a nice udemy course and it'll teach you some best practices and stuff but the way at least i retain information and it could be different from other people but the way i do it is i'll have a project in mind something like i need a habit tracker i'm trying to form some habits right now yes i can go out and find a habit tracker that will do that for me but i need one that specifically caters around me like maybe i do three day habits or something you know something that works for me that i know works for me so i'll build a little side project that caters to a specific problem that i have and while doing that i'll try to kind of learn the full stack solution as i'm building and that will accelerate your development process very quickly so there's one way you can you know if you're going through a course you're following along and you're building a project with the instructor sure but it's it's a totally different mindset and it takes that little shift that little shift where it's your own project and you're able to then apply those skills that i was talking about with googling you're able to apply the skills of just trying to like you know hammer out a problem because as a developer you're a problem solver that's your number one thing that you do you're not a code writer you're not anything you have to solve problems and you're gonna get into roadblock after roadblock after roadblock and the only way to get better at that is to throw roadblocks at yourself and try to get through them and at some point you'll see it you'll start clicking that like you're not going to get afraid of roadblocks anymore and you're going to get into the system where you're like oh good another roadblock this is how i'm going to try to solve it and that's it the only way to do that is through actually coding and actually solving problems so go and code is the best way to level up as a junior coder totally yeah jacob says i love that idea building custom projects that you can use you're effectively your own first customer yeah totally then you get the testing in it as well yeah that's great oh michael has reposted his question will having an online presence for blogging youtube etc benefit you in applying for a first developer position especially in regards to career changes i think 100 yes this is something that i've recently started to implement in my first of all uh in my own approach for finding work and stuff like that but also in the approach that i do when i interview people so i was a tech lead at a startup for about three years prior to the last couple of few months and i was interviewing as part of my job i i had to interview people and i would always kind of poke them at like hey like what you know what what's your passion like where do you what do you do and a lot of the times they would have you know you know they they did some projects for a boot camp or something like that and that's it but the people that really stood out were the ones that were like hey i made this site for my dnd group or something where we could all post our our um our character sheets and we could all update them together and stuff like that and like you know and then they would go into a deep discussion about the site and the structure that they made to do it that passion that you have for those side things bleeds through and same with blogging so let's say you're in an interview and you're talking about uh iterating over an array you can mention in that interview be like you know give them the answer and be like yeah i wrote like four or five blog posts just on this topic actually and you can tell them where you wrote those blog posts that is the kind of like little passion that can bleed through and put you on a different level than the other applicants because that shows that you're not only understanding the concepts you're ready to teach the concepts and that's a you know as everyone knows the teaching part is a totally different skill and not only that when you're writing those blog posts you're going to solidify your skills a thousand times more when you're when you're in the mindset of like hey i've got to teach someone this at a at the lowest level possible that makes you learn things at the lowest level possible and learn them better than you would we're just like rushing through and trying to solve a problem yeah it's also an opportunity to show off some skills that maybe don't come up in the technical interview so you can't show off everything in there i guess but if you've written a blog post about it there's a chance they might see it so yeah definitely worth doing michael yeah lovely um so um we touched a little bit on building projects and how that's useful for junior developers is it also useful for people before that stage yes uh for you honestly i'm a project-based learner i've talked a lot about project-based learning on the podcast i've talked a lot about project-based learning to just random co-workers and stuff like that i think for me that's how i would learn and if you're just starting out it might be a little bit too ambitious to think like oh i'm just going to build this massive project right but the idea is in my head is that you pick something that you want to build and instead of just going randomly and looking at courses and stuff like that and just trying to do courses you pick the youtube videos and the courses that can apply to your project and what that'll do is it'll give you that seed that while you're learning the course like you're learning javascript or something you're going to be like oh wait i can apply that to this project and then as soon as you finish that course you can go back and be like okay let me build this little system here just that little system that i was thinking of and that again that interest in something that you're building for yourself or something you're building for someone else will accelerate your knowledge heavily like it'll it'll be a it'll be kind of like a cheat code because you're going to have that passion you're gonna have the commitment like you're investing in it because you want to use it yeah totally this is what we're trying to do with the weekly web dev challenge so we give people challenges um and they can be quite basic so if you're beginner you just do the kind of basic challenge but what's nice about it is people kind of build it up and they build all kinds of amazing different things and i nearly always find things that i've never seen before so it's amazing really so you can use something like this and kind of make it your own i love that and honestly like that's it's a really good little technique to use let's let's say you're doing these challenges or you're doing a course project my advice to everyone is pick something really small and change it so this is the eight ball challenge right so if it's an eight ball challenge then maybe pull in some quotes from an api or something for the 8-ball you know what i mean like just something really small just find that find that really small thing because again that gets you that to shift your mind a little bit and have to troubleshoot and problem solve on your own while still having that structured platform of like an assignment of course a project or something to follow yeah that's it so you don't have to build a huge project from scratch just to get building something you can add a balcony to your building so to speak yeah [Applause] so a lot of people ask me this question um i'm not sure what the answer is do people need to learn data structures and algorithms to get a job in tech yeah so the key there is to get a job right in tech and not to actually be in tech or something so this one's a difficult one um if you're a web developer right let's say let's say you're looking for a web design job like you just want to build website html css a little bit of javascript a lot of agencies i've noticed i've stopped asking these data structures and algorithms questions they'll ask you specific questions to laying out a website they'll ask you specific questions to seo and stuff like that but they'll put those data structures and algorithms on the side because they're they're weeding out too many good employees and they're they're pricing pricing scale is a little bit different too so for those jobs and you can usually find out if they ask you data structures and algorithms by the either the job description or by literally asking them then no you don't technically need to know data structures and algorithms but for a lot of jobs a lot of them still you're going to need to know them for the interview because there's going to be a whiteboard portion or a take-home portion where you're going to have to explain some binary tree structures or how does a linked list works stuff like that and yes you might use those during your job depending on how complex it is but most of the time from my experience you're probably not going to have to build a binary tree from scratch you're going to implement a binary tree that's already been built and you're just going to need to know how to use it which is a completely different subset of skills than building it from scratch so in my opinion again this goes back to that conversation that we that we were having before with the interview the interview system we have right now is broken and there's no like i'm not saying that there's a way to fix it i'm not saying what's the best way to do it but i'm just saying like we need to rethink it a little bit and uh try to get the best talent for the job instead of trying to put people through kind of quote unquote hell and see who sticks that sounds like a good idea doesn't it yeah so long story short you you might have to know it but hopefully we're moving towards not knowing for at least you know portions obviously there's some jobs where it comes in handy like you need it if you're doing some sort of like data optimization work and you need to make sure that the data is compressed in a perfect way sure that job should ask you data structure and algorithms 100 because you're going to be using them but if you know the job's not going to ask you them like why why put a person through that yeah totally danny says no professionals use the fizz buzz algorithm i don't know if that's a real algorithm but who knows yes it's not it's just it's just again an interview question about like writing fizz buzz in a certain pattern it's it's useful i i don't understand it i've never been able to apply the skills that i gained from figuring out how to do a fizzbuzz to an actual job wow yeah well hopefully interviews will go in the right direction soon which brings me to my next question what's the best way to prepare for a coding interview it's just a really good question i don't have a ton a ton and ton of experience uh doing a lot of interviews luckily for me i've done a lot of contract to hire approaches but i have done a few and i have interviewed people what my suggestion to you is again going back to the other system try to figure out what the interview is going to be about is it going to have data structure and algorithms you can do this by again checking stuff like glassdoor checking uh asking the intro like asking the company what kind of what kind of stuff is going to be covered i know i've been asked that many times as the interviewer and i've always been up front being like hey we're going to cover php we're going to cover javascript this is we're going to cover you know i'll see you next week and they have all that opportunity to you know focus exactly on what i'm going to cover and i've hardly ever throw curveballs so as a person that's trying to figure out what to cover try to again ask as many people figure it out online you can check reddit sometimes they'll have they'll have some posts about a job but once you have that knowledge of what they're going to cover focus in on that a lot of the times you won't be able to google so you need to know these things off the top of your head practice a lot do stuff like lead code problems i i do this sometimes just for fun which is kind of an insane thing to do but it helps me with like imposter syndrome but regardless like do those little algorithm problems like fizzbuzz because as as much as we you know we're kind of crapping on it right now it's not it's it's something that's still in the industry you're going to need to know it and the more you do it the easier it is going to be for you on on the actual interview and the other thing is like don't like when you're in the interview don't try to guess things the interviewer and is not going to expect you to know 100 of the answers to all the questions that they give you they want to see your reasoning how you get to an answer again back to that that thing how do you get to an answer or how do you how would you solve this problem so if you don't know something be like hey i don't know this i didn't cover it in a while but this is how i would this is how i would find out i would go on google i would go to the documentation i would find out tell them how you would get the answer if you don't know something don't guess don't be like oh i think it would be this because let's say best case scenario you figure you guessed correctly they're going to ask you a follow-up on that and now you're going to be stuck with your you know stuck with your face on a question you don't even know yeah that's true and that's the best case scenario yeah good advice jackie jackson is asking if college matters when you're applying for jobs so yeah um how would you approach being a self-taught learner and applying for jobs so this is kind of a touchy subject recently for whatever reason but um i i graduated college i put it on my resume sure i think it's important i think you're like graduating great like it's real it's really good it can give you a certain set of skills for how to learn i'm not even talking about the knowledge you gain in college it's more like the process of learning something and it gives you the indication or it gives the employer an indication that hey this person can stick through a four-year program that you know that says something having said that if you're a self-taught developer which is a lot of people out there you know how you can show people the dedication by doing the projects that i was talking about before if a person sees that hey instead of an education section you have a project section and you have three projects or three different github repos or something like that and they see your process of solving a project that could be very very useful for them to decide if if they want to hire you or not and it's absolutely not not impossible for you to get a job even a really good job like with a large fan company like i've heard of this before where they've got people have gotten jobs but based on the previous work they've done and they didn't even graduate i know we had one group like two people in our uh college program that were able to secure jobs at google through like a little side project that they were working on through college and they didn't even like they didn't even bother finishing they were in the second year they're just like oh we got jobs at google and they both went and you know interviewed and got got the jobs and went and lived in new york i think it was or something so i'm not saying that like college doesn't help you because i think it does for the reasons i mentioned before but i think as a self-taught developer you still have the opportunity to get those interviews and to get those jobs if you put in the effort if you're just gonna put no education no projects nothing on your resume yeah you're going to have an issue but if you show to the employer that hey i'm able to do this like here here's the evidence then they're going to consider you yeah totally great advice i'd like to talk a bit about um situations on the job i suppose i can frame it as and one of my questions is any tips on when to ask for help versus working out for yourself so by this i mean you don't want to be the person constantly asking but you also don't want to be stuck for two weeks on the same thing how do you know when to ask so this is something that i struggle with so i have some perspective on it i i didn't ask for help enough and i think it's a very good skill to have and it's a very thing it is like it's tough to put yourself out there and asking for help in a job especially when you're just starting out because you're like i want to prove myself but you're also hindering yourself by not doing it so my rule of thumb for a let's say a junior developer first starting out try it for approximately try to figure out the answer for approximately 30 minutes and i know that's not a lot of time but honestly if you can you know prove to yourself that you can't solve something in 30 minutes you know seven hours down the line it's you might be able to get it but is that really worth it where you can just go and ask someone and the thing is is that a lot of the times when you go and ask someone a question you're not going to get a direct answer you're actually going to get a you know this is how i would solve that problem like a a direction to go and for you to then go back and be like okay this is what it is and a lot of the times it's it's not because you don't know how to solve it because you're you're asking the wrong question so asking someone will allow them to quickly give you an idea of what the right question is and you can go back and solve it yourself so again as a junior developer i would ask a lot of questions but don't ask like like land saying don't ask a question every five seconds give yourself a half an hour try to solve it try to google it try to do it try to troubleshoot check the directory the the faq and all that check the docs and then be like okay when you go and ask it be like hey you know i spent some time on this i did this this and this i couldn't get it to work always always give them that like what you've done already because then they know that hey this person isn't just like asking a question randomly this person has tried it and failed and most developers will be very happy to answer yeah and that's a great tip and um heidi's asking will this um stream be available later indeed it will on our youtube channel so you'll be able to send it to your son who's just starting out in the field yeah perfect yeah no that is a really good tip and i think you're totally right about if you haven't worked out in 30 minutes seven hours down the line it's iffy and asking someone at least will give you an idea of if you're on the right track or yeah completely up the wrong tree yeah but how about then on this if you find yourself in a situation where you have absolutely no idea how to solve a problem how can you kind of do that initial research if you're really promised yeah so uh so how can learners or junior devs tackle coding problems that they have no idea how to solve this is a good this is a really good question um it's very difficult and this is why this is why i say the reaching for asking is a really good way to start but if you're completely on your own let's say you're in a company that hired you to complete a whole system poor poor junior developer but that happens like that's not out of the realm of possibility and you're completely on your own all the other developers are tied up i would try to google a solution so like jacob said earlier on in the stream there's plenty of open source projects out there that have implemented certain things that you're probably trying to implement try to google and try to find an actual project that's done this you can go on github and try to find it you can go on google you can go on anything and try to find a project that's already kind of done it from at least point a to point like b and then you have to take it yourself obviously all the way to zed or something like that but that little bit of start for you that basic scaffold that basic idea of where to start is what you're looking for in this part because again you're not going to be able to ask the right questions even google the right questions on google if you have no idea how to tackle the problem so you need to give yourself all that you can to get from point a to b don't think about points like don't think about solving the entire project you need to start the project and then you'll start slowly working at it one piece at a time breaking it up into tasks and figuring it out but it's the the hardest thing again is to get from point a to b not from point a to z yeah very interesting point though danny thompson's dropped in hello danny hey dan thanks for coming danny says the first thing you should do is restate the problem in your own words yeah that's good i think that's yeah half of the problem sometimes is kind of getting the question out of your brain and into google so yeah that is very good now tip well danny has a question for you um mike i want to get better at html is there a resource or podcast that you would recommend listening to this is yeah danny i was on one of danny's spaces recently had the same thing was great uh but they're like our podcast for sure we cover some html stuff but it's not just html actually so for sure check out our podcast we have some episodes dedicated to html css purely because we love that stuff we we are very much about the basics try to you know get a hold of get get a pillar built try to get your html pillar try to get your css pillar try to get your javascript pillar built and then move on to everything else so we talk about that a lot but we have a ton of other stuff and the html in our name is just because hey we needed something to you know put that we like the basics we like web development and stuff like that and the all the things part of it is actually just like that meme i don't know if you've ever seen it but there's a meme with all the things and that that's part that part but yeah thanks thanks for that danny thanks for allowing me to give it a shout out appreciate you lots of interesting topics to listen to it link um dropped in the chat so check it out and how to listen today very nice topics so yes go over there asap andrei asks css bootstrap or sass which should i use that's a good one uh so for personally i use tailwind right now uh but again there's so many great tools out there scss i've been looking into that recently it's like a compiler pre-compiler for us for css i think that one is fantastic uh you can do a lot with it like nesting loops and stuff like that and you can kind of organize your css based on how your html is organized which is kind of cool um but i don't think there's anything wrong with just like again i go back to three pillars if you learn css jumping to tailwind jumping to scss jumping to all these different frameworks is going to be really easy it's almost going to be trivial for you it's just going to be another thing that you have to learn rather than being like a whole other thing so always start with css if you're just learning learn it pretty well and then move on to any of these other frameworks bootstrap is great i don't want to say anything bad about bootstrap as well i think i've used it in many many projects in the past i've just moved on to a more in-line css method with tailwind i like that a little bit better it makes it makes a little bit more fast faster for me and stuff like that so that that's why i use it but again they're all great yeah i completely agree about getting the basics down first that's what we always say on scrimba what other good habits should developers foster uh yeah so this one's interesting for for a developer the most important thing for you when you're first not even when you're first starting out as you get comfortable with development is finding the hours of the day that you can get the most amount of work done because for us like we can get distracted really easily and that'll completely derail us and stuff like that but for every person there's different sets of hours that are like their deep work hours for me it's anywhere between 8 a.m till about 1 pm so those are my most productive hours so what i try to do is i make the habit of blocking out that time as much as i possibly can obviously there's different situations interviews and stuff like that where i can't but i try to do as best i can to block out that time to focus on working on projects and when i do i always get like two or three times more work done in that four hour span than i do in the next seven hours after that right if i were to work like a 10 10-hour day or something like that so that's one thing uh the other thing for a developer is commit often this is something that i struggle with sometimes i recently posted on twitter about how i forgot to commit during like a two-day sprint and that was a disaster um but regardless often uh because after every feature that you build that's when you should commit like so you build that you know adding a task or something like that to your to-do list commit you add a you add a ui element commit commit as often as seems fit don't be afraid to commit you know several times a day like you know five six times a day it's not a big deal it's better to commit more than to commit less if that makes sense because as you go back and if you're building a side project let's say that you're trying to get people to notice you on they're actually going to go in and see your structure like how you went through solving that project they're going to check your commit messages that's going to be something that a a potential employer will absolutely take a look at and if they see an initial commit with everything in there and that's it that's going to be a red flag i promise you like i've had this discussion with many hiring managers and stuff like that that's always a red flag so commit often commit with descriptive text uh try to be you know casual about it you don't have to commit like every little thing but try to try to make it so that the you can so a person that's looking at your uh project can see the journey for you from start to finish what we need i'm showing my age here but is you remember in word we used to have that paper clip telling us to save we need a vs code one of those telling us to commit everyone hated that paper clip but i found it quite helpful there we go i remember it really well you could change it to a dog or a cat or various others yeah yeah someone should make an extension for vs code that's a side project yeah totally yeah maybe i should one more question as our hour unbelievably is almost up and we've touched a bit on side projects i want to ask you about side hustles by which i mean means of making money outside of your nine-to-five there's a lot of talk on twitter about these does everyone need to have one absolutely not uh i think not everyone needs to have one it's something that you should be very deliberate about having because like the difference between a side project and a side hustle is fairly big because a side hustle is meant to generate income that's your goal right that's going to that's going to actually affect almost every part of that project so with a side project that generates income or side hustle that generates income you have to not think about the technology the technology is one of the last things you think about you have to think about the marketing you have to think about the people that you're going to be advertising to you have to consider like how much money is it going to cost to do x and ysd like there's just a lot of other considerations to be made and then you go to the technology and what i usually recommend for a side hustle is actually picking not something that you want to learn but something that you're really really comfortable with because you're only going to have maybe 40 percent of your time to spend on actually building it and the other 60 percent to market it to be in the community promoting it to just establishing connections for it and stuff like that that's more of what a side hustle is whereas a side project is very much focused on the actual technology and the learning process so side hustles are not for everyone in any way shape or form side projects are more so because especially when you're trying to learn and stuff like that and you're trying to get up in the industry i think it's a really important thing to do but uh yeah so that's that would be my answer yeah good answer i'm just going to wrap up now with a quick fire questions here debjit i commit a huge portion is it wrong um it would be better to break it down into smaller chunks i think is fair to say yep as mike said earlier exactly it's fair to say and not only that like um it's not wrong like obviously like you're still getting stuff done that's great don't don't you know don't beat yourself up about it but go back and be like hey where could i have broken this up and then try to move that move forward with that yeah that's a good idea ben says what ide do you recommend vs code me too and finally skb says i'm not being consistent with my javascript for days now how do i become more consistent i recommend scrimmers learn javascript course the reason this will help you with that other than i have to say that is it is broken down into very short lessons so it's very easy to dip in and out of it but also very entertaining so you'll find yourself doing many of them and not just one so that is my hot tip for today yes well that brings us to the end of the hour i would like to re-emphasize my desire for you all to build a magic 8-ball in the latest weekly web dev challenge that would be lovely and um join us on friday we will be coding a javascript clock this is not the current weekly web dev challenge we did that last week because there are two weeks to do the challenge it's an old one um but it looks good so yes hi pumpkin and i michael pumpkin and i will be doing that on friday i hope to see you all there yes well thanks very much for joining us mike it was brilliant to have you and um yeah everyone go and check out mike's podcast that looks fabulous and then if you enjoyed this hit subscribe for more ask and expert live streams and other live streams yeah thank you thank you very much leanne it was awesome yeah thanks very much see you all next time [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Scrimba

Views: 1,925

Keywords: how to google, learn how to google, how to google like a pro, google search, google search tricks, google search tips, google, search tips, advanced google search, google tricks, google for students, google for researchers, how to use google, online research google, how to find information on google, search within websites, google tips and tricks, research tips, academic research tips, research, how to research, things to know about doing research, how to do research

Id: u6ODPOV57Lw

Length: 62min 54sec (3774 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 01 2021