Introduction

In this world of information as a software engineer we have some great resources that guide us and provide us with information required for our daily activities.

Some of the references available to us are:

• stackoverflow.com
• medium.com
• Engineering blogs written by an organization or by an individual
• Github Repositories
• Recently some LLMs like ChatGPT, Bard etc.
• Youtube/Tutorials/MOOC
• Private Groups.
• And many more

Now there is one specific resource that I missed out that is the Official Documentation for the piece of software in use. This post is all about my observations in the recent years.

Dependency on resources

With so many resources and references available for us it gets difficult to decide which one is the right one for us and which is the way that the software community suggests.

A lot of things available to us can be an opinion where, we might like something to be done in a certain way so we promote our way, it might not apply to others reading it.

Then comes the point where you are facing an issue, which obviously we use a search engine and we land on the lifeline of engineers stackoverflow.com, where people share their solutions.

The recent ones I see is the AI LLMs that are having a huge hype now a days. Where we simply give a prompt and within seconds without doing my own research without sweating and toiling for hours and days for answers we get the almost right solution.

Engineering blogs, Github repositories are also an awesome source for information, where we mostly get specific type of information about how an organisation is solving X or some individual doing Y.

Why read Official Documentation?

Here is a piece of documentation provided by the people implementing some piece of software. Whose sole responsibility is to provide the end user with all the information they might need while using the software. It might have links to other resources that are advanced in nature.

All the secondary and tertiary information available for the software available in some other references comes from the Official documentation just twisted in a certain manner.

I mean if someone is providing a software X obviously they will have more information of that piece of software than any end user. Ofcourse there will be some software Y that does the same thing for which the team working on Y will have more context as compared to software X even though they are doing the same things. Example: Video players, game engines, editors, JS Frameworks everyone is trying to do almost same things but they are different entities in themselves.

Now all the other sources should not be discarded as the end users might share their use cases, their solutions and things that other end users solving similar kind of problem might find helpful.

Conclusion

Here we saw various ways we gather information from various sources and it is important to give weightage to the source. The entire exercise of reading through multiple sources analysing, inferring and researching are the ones that are the most critical for an engineer. For me the research capabilities of an engineer are above and beyond. Using AI tool to get answers looks lucrative but if its hampering your research and analytical abilities then an introspection is indeed needed.

These are my observations and thought process which might not be applicable for many.

If you like my article or want to share an insight feel free to reach out to me.

• Engineering
• Documentation
• Reading