there's a level of knowledge which only comes from fixing a break
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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Yeah, the knowledge that 6 hours of debugging can save you from 10 long and extenuating minutes of reading the documentation. That one you can only get by fixing the problem.
Docs can only really help you if your problem is "I have used X from the library Y, yet I do not understand the baseline definition of X sufficiently and this is causing issues". A lot of problems in practice are much more fundamental than that
You sound like the guy who writes documentation in the form of:
// functionA = is function that does A
/s
Yeah but have you seen some people's documentation? I get it's not a glamorous task but I've seen some stinkers before (a heap of properties and methods just thrown on a page with barely any description and no reasonable samples)
For real. More like 6 hours of debugging to figure out what they meant by the documentation you read in the first 5 minutes.
I copied and pasted some code from their own docs and it was missing required fields and those fields weren't clear or documented well. Going into their code helped more but still.
Also, the docs weren't written with me in mind. It's like if you were already familiar with it or a previous version because I swear I read it four times.
WAIT WAIT who made this??? It's unreadable!!!
He speaks while on Battle Cat, then departs on a Battle Ram? It's unconscionable. So pedestrian.
404! Documentation doesn't exist!
I will never unsee this. Thanks.
Docs? Is that like a new ChatGPT feature or something?
It actually kinda is. GPT-4 has an enormous token size so you can upload the whole documentation of a framework or program and ask it specific questions to it
Has it though?
AFAIK it has like 4k tokens which roughly translate to 3k words or something like that.
The API has 8k or even 32k (this model should be interesting for something like that, unfortunately still don't have access to it...)
So the docs have to be rather short, that it gets all the relevant stuff, or am I missing something?
GitHub Copilot just got an update increasing the token to 8k so I think it can be queried to help you with something similar. I haven't had the chance to test it further after the new update.
I have ADHD and I'll often find myself spending hours trying to find a fix, finally read the docs, get distracted, go back to finding a fix without the docs, remember that I was in the middle of reading a docs, and repeat
I usually get distracted reading one of the different APIs in the documentation and went down on a rabbit hole reading the whole history of some totally unrelated thing that just popped into my head and then realized what I had to do when I was going to bed and I ended up working thru the night.
The other times I got stuck for a couple of hours looking for new themes for my code editor because I didn't like how my current theme looked.
Oh well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If only this was true.
Now do one with a GI Joe PSA
I'm glad you guys have great docs to reference instead of deprecated 1.X versions of dependencies you have to figure out by yourself.
“Documentation”
Spoken like someone who never came close to SAP
We don't call them idiots guides for no reason!
I feel personally attacked
Yo Joe!!