The most important lesson for new programmers

Published on: 15.01.2019

On my “Sending email from Python” blog post what was cross-published on Medium I got a comment asking how to send an email via outlook programmatically.

My first reaction what that this is some troll or bot.

So I did “Let me google that for you” answer and later got “Thank you” response.

That got me thinking, maybe he was not an internet troll, maybe he just does not know how to google.

It never crosses his mind that he can ask google for the answer.

Why I was thinking that somebody was trolling me

I am an experienced (15+ years) software developer, I am experienced because I know that when I do not know something first I google it, that I search on youtube and the last resort is to ask StackOverflow.

This is what professionals do, they do not ask questions on random blogs in hope that somebody will respond.

Learn how to google

For beginners learning to code, best what you can do for yourself (and other) is to learn to google what you do not know.

Today it is easier to learn coding than 20 years ago when I was starting.

At my time the only thing that you had was a book (if you were lucky).

Today there are much more opportunities to learn:

  • you have Youtube today what is the largest free video learning tool
  • google for asking
  • and StackOverflow communities where you can ask questions

Be aware that you should not ask a question specific to your particular coding problem, just bring it to a more abstract level.

Tips on googling

From my experience, it is important to know which keywords to google.

But if you do not know keywords you can always start with “how to …..”.

Any action is better than no action.

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