Since the growth of the internet, there have been miraculous improvements in search engines and many other ways of human interactions with computers but there is still more room for improvement. Whatever we think are not going to be seen directly in our search results often. This is very much true especially when you are looking for expertise information. Most people who have used internet search(google, yahoo, bing, duckduckgo) for quite some time will be able to relate this stuff.
I'm a backend developer who knows little about frontend can how do I go about finding the information I want in frontend technology.
For example, say what particular CSS properties will help in making the element sticky while scrolling. In this blog, I want to share my findings on how to get such expertise information in the area of software development which could also be useful for many other fields.
Short answer, Googling - Using the search engine effectively is definitely an art.
You may argue from the above example, that you should simply read about the css properties from the fundamentals, sign up for a good css course, do a tutorial, read a book, etc.
If you wanted to be an expert in that area, you should definitely do it, I'm not denying it at all. But in a startup environment where speed is valued more than many other qualities of running a business, we need to learn and tweak/hack/build many of our systems in high speed with a quicker understanding of the technologies.
To name a few examples: To put something out in the market and test, to pivot as quickly as possible, to put a smile in our customers' faces we would want to ship in lightning speed, to build a differentiating feature which is not a mainstream in the domain.
To understand and learn technologies at this speed, learning things from fundamentals and gaining expertise and then building it is not the right thing for an early startup environment, If you could do it only by learning the fundamentals and gaining enough expertise then even the bigger competitors or the companies in your space can also do it. So, we often end up shipping things at a fast pace, by understanding the technology in bits and pieces and kickstarting our project. We know we are adding tech debts, unmaintainable code, many other bottlenecks while scaling and building on top of this feature. To clean up these, we should actually be reading from fundamentals only. That is not the point we are delving into today.
For a simple understanding of googling the right way, I'm just taking the CSS example above. In more practical cases, we will be looking at a specific expertise way of solving a tiny problem in our tech stack or technologies.
Assuming you know very little about CSS and frontend technologies, You might be looking to implement a UI that shouldn't be moved once it reaches the top of the page on scrolling.
The first thing that comes to your mind will be to search for all the words you think in your mind.
Like ”CSS no movement on scroll”
On searching this, you will find a few results which could seem that it is going to help but upon entering and reading a few you will know it is not exactly what you are looking for. But while digging into these search results, you would've noticed few more keywords which are resonating or which is more related to your asks. In this example, I found it as a 'position' property in CSS. I would call these keywords as baits for the fish (expert information) you are looking for.
Now that you have a bait word, you can rephrase the search again, like “position no movement after a certain scroll”
In this second attempt, I found another keyword called 'fixed' which are used in position properties, this helped to make my ask more specifically. Then in the next search, I will be like “position fixed after certain scroll position css”.
In few cases, you might get the baits sooner if people have linked other resources or articles on one page.
Not always you will end up with the right kind of baits. At times, you might feel that some of the things are not on the internet and you will have to do it on your own, you must be kidding 95% of the time(just a made-up number indicating that many things you look for are present in www), there are humongous things on the internet.
You may be using the wrong set of baits, change your baits and do a deep dive couple of times to the correct set of keywords needed.
After the above search, I have actually found the solution I was looking for. Some good soul has asked the same question in StackOverflow and there was a couple of answers by many other good souls.
You need not stop here, as you found what the solution is specifically, you can now do another attempt in your fishing like ”make element sticky css tutorial”
I found there were sweeter examples on how to use it with a tutorial on how the results would be.
To summarise,
just type whatever comes to your mind
Find the bait words
Search again, find the right the baits
after you get the fish, even do one more surf to get nicer solutions
There could be better alternatives debatably in using search engines, like asking an expert friend. This post is not to start a debate on what is the best idea for google. If you like the idea of the above way of sharing niche and tiny things subscribe to my newsletter.