Can You Code Without Google?

Back in the late nineties, I remember coding to a Lotus Notes API and how difficult it was to find good documentation.

I’d search through Lotus’ website in vain and while the internet existed there wasn’t really a lot of good information out there. It was still too new and the communities had not yet developed.

Also there was no good way to find the information even if it was there. I was stuck with having to dig through a stack of large 500 page technical books and hope that they had a good index.

Life got better when I switched to doing Microsoft programming. They always seemed to cater to developers. In fact, I seem to remember a certain CEO getting very excited about developers, developers, developers.

And nowadays, it’s crazy how easy it is to find information on programming. Last week I needed to a function to get the current week of the year. With a simple Google, I easily had it.

In fact, I don’t even install the API documentation locally anymore because it’s all on the web and it’s become easier for me to Google it than to hit F1.

Even when looking for details on new technologies, like Silverlight, there are dedicated blogs. I’m not sure exactly when we made this shift but it’s become such an important part of the way I work, I’m beginning to wonder how efficiently I could program without Google?

It makes me feel sorry for the corporate developers that have extremely locked down IT policies so if they hit something that has “blog” in the name they are immediately shut out of it.

I have to wonder how much money the company is losing when it doesn’t let a developer look up a simple function and instead forces them to dig through old help files or guess at how an API works…