The Best Development Tool, EVER.

January 16 2008 by Andrew Powell

Any developer worth their salt will admit that they do not know everything about their trade. Anyone who does is either a fool or delusional. Plain and simple. With this premise in mind, let's proceed. In the past seven years or so, something wonderful has happened. Developers have really taken to blogging (obviously). This has lead to an unparalleled compendium of knowledge about every development language used today. If you run into an error, or problem that you can't solve, you can turn to a developer's best friend and strongest tool for an answer: Google. If you need a code sample, tutorial, error fix, or bug fix there's a good chance that someone else has already run into it and blogged about it. Just search it. If someone has not blogged your particular tip or fix, go ahead and add to the compendium and blog it yourself. Only you, the developer who uses this great resource for help can add to it. This is a call to arms to developers to try to blog at least one tip or code trick a month for this year. If you do that, we can keep adding to and expanding this wealth of knowledge we have available on the Internet. According to Google Analytics, most of my traffic comes via search engines, and to a smaller extent aggregators. This tells me that people are using search engines more and more to help them with their development. We are, as a community, in essence, training each other. The real kicker to this though is that the other day, I was googling how to do something with Spry and came upon my own blog with the answer. What a kick in the gut that was. I guess it's at the very least, just a bit ironic. I was helping myself with an answer. Go figure.

Posted in ColdFusion | Flex | General | Spry | Google | Adobe | Training | 6 comments

6 responses to “The Best Development Tool, EVER.”

1. Sammy Larbi Says:
   Jan 16, 2008 at 12:00 AM <p>I never thought of it that way, but it's a good insight.</p>
   
   <p>I'll try to take you up on your challenge.</p>
2. James Marshall Says:
   Jan 16, 2008 at 12:00 AM <p>I couldn't agree more! I've been a developer for years, but during the last year (since I picked up CF) I've progressed so much. Before I was coding in PHP and was quite comfortable with my level of skill so didn't really participate. It was only by learning a new language that I was forced to reevaluate the resources available to me, and the CF blogs out there were indispensable in bringing me up to speed.</p>
3. Ben Nadel Says:
   Jan 16, 2008 at 12:00 AM <p>Great post. Sometimes, you see a blog post where the person even says something like, "I'm just posting this here for my own future reference." Those posts always seem a little silly, but really they are hugely useful, not only for the person who posts it, but as you say, for all the developers who try to Google it. </p>
   
   <p>As far as the Analytics, I am in the same boat. The majority of my users come from searches.</p>
4. Mac Sims Says:
   Jan 16, 2008 at 12:00 AM <p>Googling has been one of my main avenues for expanding my coding knowledge.</p>
   
   <p>Recently, I was looking for a way to colorize rows of a DataGrid based on the data in the DataProvider, and finding no native support for that went googling. Now I didn't find the exact solution I was looking for, but I did find similar enough code that others had done to give me a good direction and head start on creating my own solution of extending the DataGrid class.</p>
   
   <p>I eventually blogged about the solution I had created, but also went a step further and went back to those helpful blog posts and added comments to link to my solution so that others would have even more variations and approaches to consider and learn from.</p>
   
   <p>I have reaped great benefits from the blogging development community and have committed to give something back. My personal goal is one post a week, but we will see how much time I can find to make that happen.</p>
5. Sean Corfield Says:
   Jan 16, 2008 at 12:00 AM <p>As Ben says, it's often a good idea to post hints and tips for your own future reference. I certainly do that from time to time and I often find my own blog posts in search results when I'm looking for a memory jogger on how to solve a problem!</p>
6. Steve Bryant Says:
   Jan 17, 2008 at 12:00 AM <p>I rely heavily on Google to find answers to problems.</p>
   
   <p>Like you, I recently saw one of my own blog entries appear first in a search for a problem. At first this annoyed me ("I know the answer isn't in the post, because then I would already know the answer."). I looked at the entry anyway only to discover that I did, at one time, know the answer.</p>
   
   <p>That certainly is an encouragement to keep blogging.</p>

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