Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer

Update 15/10/2022: I've written a new version of this! Everything I googled in a week as a senior software engineer

In an attempt to dispel the idea that if you have to google stuff you're not a proper engineer, this is a list of nearly everything I googled in a week at work, where I'm a software engineer with several years' experience.

Obviously these weren't all googled in a row (although you can probably spot that a few were), but throughout the day. I can't remember the context of everything I was googling, but hopefully it'll make you feel a little better next time you have to google something.

Monday

npm react-testing-library - during a React upgrade, looking at dependencies to see latest versions and checking for breaking changes.

Expecting a parsed GraphQL document. Perhaps you need to wrap the query string in a "gql" tag? - said React upgrade then started causing some super fun errors.

react-apollo release notes

react-apollo/test-utils - tests were throwing some odd errors with our graphQL components.

undo a rebase - oops.

react testing library apollo "invariant violation" - package upgrades are so much fun!

jest silence warnings - don't judge me, ok?

semantic HTML contact details - wanted to check if the <address> tag was relevant here

aa contrast checker

temporary visual impairment - fact checking for an accessibility talk I was giving that week

dominos accessibility - popcorn.gif

shame gif - an important part of any presentation

Tuesday

javascript get array of unique dates - if I have an array of Dates, how can I filter them so they are unique? (reduce, naturally, but I can rarely use that without googling it first)

date to locale string

js date to locale string - after I got a load of Java results

alternatives to Moment.js - it's large

group array items by date - more reduce fun

sort object keys javascript

react fragment keys

next link - needed a reminder of how to use the Link component in Next.JS

React.Children.only expected to receive a single React element child.

visual studio code disable autocomplete html - it keeps autoclosing HTML elements on the same line, and I still can't switch it off

dt dd dl - couldn't remember what the example use for these was.

html nested sections - is it ok to have <section> inside <section>?

display dl in pairs

veggie ipsum - the best lorem ipsum generator

css keyframes

css animate underline text

dl vs ul

react generating keys - should I use some kind of hash, or should I use data in the props? (I ended up constructing a string with unique timestamp data)

css checkbox - can we style checkboxes yet? (no)

flexbox center span - it was 17:24 and I was tired by this point

grid minmax

flexible grid row - I don't have a whole lot of CSS Grid experience, so I always end up googling a ton with this.

grid row height auto

cauliflower shortage - someone told me about this and I panicked

next.js hooks - we can use them, right? (we can, and I did)

Wednesday

cors - today is going to be bleak

the corrs - once I hit some CORS errors I decided I needed to make a meme, and I needed to find the perfect image. It took a surprisingly long time.

git patch trailing whitespace - I was sent a git patch with some whitespace that prevented it from actually patching

jsx annotation

web api fetch preflight - in my CORS adventures I wanted to read up a bit more about preflight requests.

web api fetch origin header

discriminated union flow - trying to diagnose problems with my Flow types.

whitespace regex - is it \w? (no, that's a word - it's \s)

regex not letter

pat butcher emoji - what can I say, I google important things

woman shouting at cat

google oauth

next.js authentication - sometimes it's helpful to google stuff to see if anyone has written examples of how to do common flows in the framework or tool that you're using

component displayname - do I need to do this with my higher-order components?

nextCookie - starting to mess around with oauth cookies

reading cookies in react - there must be a better way than document.cookie

js-cookie npm

cookies-js

npm cookie

universal-cookie

google oauth cookie

🍪

Thursday

"log in with google" localhost - was having all sorts of problems getting this to work

httpserverrequest javascript - I have a feeling this was something to do with Flow types

nextjs flowtypes - yep, there you go

"python-social-auth" react - trying to figure out if the django backend I was working with would play nicely with my React frontend

google social login

vary header

get cookie from 302

google social login cookies - I was having a really fun time with this as you can tell

google oauth cookie

python-social-auth set-cookie

python-social-auth site:stackoverflow.com

python-social-auth react site:stackoverflow.com

django - I think I gave up at this point and just googled Django because I have literally never used it

fetch send cookies

testing same origin credentials locally

cross origin cookies - spoiler alert: not a thing

useState default value

"The value of the 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header in the response must not be the wildcard '*' when when the request's credentials mode is 'include'. - googling error messages is only second to console.log() as a debugging method

useState with empty array

react hooks initial state empty array

"Provisional headers are shown" - this is where the requests weren't going through and I couldn't see what the actual headers being sent were

fetch send cookies

how to see request headers in chrome

fetch not sending cookies

Thursday was a whole lot of fun D:

Friday

provisional headers are shown - still at it.

sending cookies from localhost - have I mentioned that I hate cookies?

editing host file - desperate times (and it didn't even work)

sending cookies with different domain

next cookie

getinitialprops functional component

getting cookies from document

js find - to check the usage and return types

string contains

string methods js - I can't keep any of these in my head

js string methods - 20 mins later

js fetch manual cookie

django react cookies localhost

django react cookies localhost site:stackoverflow.com

httponly cookie

django httponly

async await promise.all

nextjs port

google appengine node ports

next rename static

install gcloud cli

method patch - couldn't remember what the HTTP method PATCH does.

nextjs env

next.js environment variables

next js docs

editing data with hooks - literally no idea what I was trying to google here but this was past 5pm so I was evidently quite tired

react form submit

dayjs - I needed the documentation again.

What I'm trying to show with all this is that you can do something 100 times but still not remember how to do it off the top of your head. Never be ashamed of googling, even if it seems like the most basic thing you're looking up. I can never remember how Date works.
I've built plenty of forms in React but couldn't remember how onSubmit worked on the Friday evening at 5:30pm. I constantly have to google JS string methods. Cookies are terrible. (Incidentally, we fixed the cookie issue by running everything in a docker container and tunneling with ngrok, so everything's on the same domain.)