Do REAL PROGRAMMERS use Stack Overflow or Google? (VLOG)

Key Takeaways

[Music] [Music] [Music] so you know one of the questions that I tend to get quite a lot is as a professional programmer how do I write code what do I do when I don't know what code to write do I use Google do I use Stack Overflow am I just that smart that I can just kind of do it from memory without even having to Google or anything is what is life like as a professional program well let them talk about that today because it seems to be something that a lot of people are confused about and I'm just going to talk about my experiences as a software engineer working on core technology FDA and how I kind of write code and how I use the internet or other references kind of facilitate that let's just get right on it so first of all yes I mean I'm pretty sure every programmer on the planet writes code with the internet I mean it's very difficult to actually write code without having anything to refer to now like to be concise with my answer what I would say is that in depends on what I'm riding if I'm riding something kind of simple like okay let's just talk about game programming and like game engine development because that's what I do professionally if I'm running something that I've written before like let's just say maybe a toonie batch renderer or something similar I don't really need to hook that up because I've done it before and I've done it enough times that I know how that how'd that how that actual component is architecture I know how to actually write that code I've done it before I might want to investigate different ways of doing it in the case that maybe I have a different idea or I'm on a different platform that I've never worked on but for the most part like I don't really need to consult a reference for that because I know what I'm doing and I've done it before and generally I tend to remember things pretty well but if it's something fairly complicated like maybe a physically based rendering like shader or something like that I can't write a PBR shader from memory like that's like thousand lines of like maths equations like I can't do that even though I have done it before I can't just do that from memory so of course I'm gonna be googling for references or maybe on github looking for a source code or maybe like awesome questions on Stack Overflow I don't do that that often but those kinds of things of course I'm gonna do things like that because I am human and I can't just remember everything that comes but but I will say that there are things of course that I do not and me personally like I'm kind of a big believer and the fact that you should be memorizing the code that you're writing like not specifically trying to memorize it but there's no reason for you to not know any code or not be able to write something on paper I'm fairly confident that I could write an entire game engine in a game on paper and it would probably kind of mostly compile right like not saying huge complicated systems but in general I should feel I should be I am confident enough that I am competent and actually writing something down on paper without looking at any reference is kind of like what you might do in an exam but when it does come to complicated things I may be looking up API things I would definitely be consulting the Internet so don't be afraid if you're if you find yourself googling constantly especially if you're just learning programming as well like it's fine if you're if you've been programming for years but if you're kind of new to it or you're new to OpenGL for example and you're you find yourself doing a lot of course even at Google stuff like that's normal people do that when I when I when I'm at work at da everyone's got like Stack Overflow or Google open on one of their monitors like it's just that's how we roll that's how you write code so don't think that it's some weird thing that you you just don't know what you're doing if you're using those resources they're there for you to use books as well a fantastic at like in the description of most of my videos I usually leave a few Amazon links to books that I really like so check those out if you haven't already but in general books are a really good resource because they're written by authors who more often than not know what they're talking about and have a lot of experience and have put a lot of effort into actually writing material for a stack overflow answers are usually just hastily written without that much thought so don't start to replace books with things like Stack Overflow or Google or like github but just use them as an additional resource and there will help you out a lot anyway hope you guys enjoyed this video let me know what your thoughts let me know what your thoughts are with the whole kind of looking up stuff on the internet and googling us that go well I'm pretty sure 100% of you watching this video if you are programmers actually do use those resources but still let me know what your thoughts are in the comment section below and I'll see you guys next time you