Saturday, April 8, 2023

reminder to self: if testing media queries in chrome, you really need to set the viewport

 Was going a little nuts trying to figure out why my media query wasn't working in chrome, 
stackoverflow was still better than ChatGTP - this is needed in the <head>:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

I was thinking about the evolution of Programmers looking for help... in the 90s your best bet was an O'Reilly book (I especially liked the "cookbook" format that put stuff in a little more context than the more text-book-y kinds.) 

Then there was a site called "experts-exchange.com" (the dash in the url was important!) where you could post a question and having a good shot at getting a decent answer.

Eventually, that was supplanted by Google and Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow wasn't that different than Experts-Exchange, but handled its gatekeeping and community and reputation-score stuff a bit better.

For a while that was as good as it got, but now frankly for many things ChatGPT provides a more direct answer.

And it's funny, I feel back in the day I used to "know more" about the languages I was using. Like PHP is my goto for light server stuff on independent projects, and I hardly remember any of its wonky API commands. (True but to a much lesser extent for js... like I always forget whether the loop I'm thinking of is for, each, or foreach...) But I got sick of looking stuff in Perl, or maybe I was younger and smarter then... I guess this new style reduces cognitive load - I know about what functions are around to get what I want done, so there's less need to rely on memory for the specifics - it's like the difference between being wise and being smart. Or at least that's what I'm telling myself.

No comments:

Post a Comment