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Comment by Timberwolf

One thing which really resonated:

"But will you do the boring but necessary browser testing to figure out if what you’re describing is always true, or just most of the time? And will you repeat that testing once new versions have come out? Will you go through related pages..."

This. A thousand times this. The problem for me isn't the quantity of information any more, it's the quality. 10-15 years ago if you hit an even slightly esoteric problem you'd bottom out a search pretty quickly and be on your own. Now, you'll find dozens of blog articles, community answers, Reddit threads... and unless you're very lucky they will all be wrong, from subtle "works on my machine"-isms up to "just commit a god-rights CI token to your repository, it'll be fine" - the telltale sign often being nobody can tell you why this is the solution, merely that they bashed other random solutions to related problems together until a particular combination happened to work.

Authoritative sources like MDN are vital in this context, having something you can refer to that tells you how things actually work so you can verify whether the suggestion you or a co-worker found on a blog is a sensible solution or the kind of horrible mess you'd expect to find alongside world-writable S3 buckets and services that regularly time out due to being OOM killed.

parent Timberwolf 6 years ago

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