Web Developer Search History

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Sophie Koonin blogged “Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer,” which was a fascinating look into the mind of a web developer and what they need to look up during day-to-day work. We all joke that we just Google stuff (or StackOverflow stuff) we don’t know off the bat and copy and paste, but this is more to the heart of it.

A few just from one day:

react-apollo release notes
jest silence warnings – don’t judge me, ok?
semantic HTML contact details – wanted to check if the <address> tag was relevant here
dominos accessibility – popcorn.gif

Gift Egwuenu followed up with “The Art of Googling.”

A few:

  • Filter an Array with JavaScript – I was working on a chore and needed to see how the filter method works
  • Take a screenshot on Mac
  • Center a div with Grid
  • Undo a git commit
  • Grid with React Native – checking if this was a thing with React Native

Reading these, I alternate from “eeeeesh, good luck” to “I wish I could have been there because I could have probably helped.”

This is a fun little blogging trend I’d love to see more people do. (Reminds me of that “How we do CSS at [company]” thing.)

I’ll do my last few days, unearthed from Google’s My Activity area, filtered to search-only.

This was just a couple of hours yesterday morning, with some noise and distracting stuff removed:

  • Sara Vieira – Was looking for her Twitter to credit a tweet.
  • javascript closest – Was looking for the DOM version rather than the jQuery version
  • jquery parent – Confirming that was a real API it had
  • minimap moz element – Finding an article that was a great use case for the
  • element() function in CSS
  • web unleashed – Going to this conference later in the week and needed to look at the site
  • server log analytics
  • states in australia
  • view html source in spark mail
  • bat crypto
  • html validator
  • html unescape
  • should email html have title?
  • window.scrollto
  • useCallback
  • rails rss feed content type
  • content type for rss feeds
  • river city girls

You next! You next!