Used to copy-paste code from Stack Overflow blindly. Now I actually read the docs first.

Last year I was building a simple login form. Grabbed the first snippet I saw. It worked but I had no idea how. Six months later I needed to add password reset. The snippet broke everything. Now I open MDN or the library docs, read the basics, then write it myself. Got stuck on async await last week. Same approach. Worked way faster. Has anyone else found that reading docs saves you more time in the long run?

3 comments

3 Comments

nelson.vera16d ago

Docs can be outdated or miss the gotchas though.

bennett.harper16d ago

The other day I was reading a post on Hacker News where someone was saying the official docs for that new framework left out a bunch of edge cases around memory leaks. @nelson.vera you're totally right that docs can be outdated or missing the gotchas that really mess you up. That same thread had a guy who found a fix in some random GitHub issue from two years ago that worked way better than anything in the manual. I've started checking Reddit threads or Stack Overflow answers that are less than a year old for any major updates before diving in. It's like you gotta triangulate between a few sources to get the full picture these days.

bennett.harper16d ago

That async await thing bit me too. So when the docs were missing something for you, did you find a better source or just trial and error your way through the gotcha?