All Developers Need This Critical Skill
Simple but not easy
Being a developer is hard, with the potential to be extremely hard.
Depending on where the company you work for is at, it is very likely you are going to be doing more or less work. For example if you are at brand new startup, you will likely wear many hats vs being at a large corporation where you are assigned to a specific area with many people already working there.
Regardless of what your workload is though, there is no reason to make things harder than they need to be. We want to focus on innovation and providing a better product/service, not spending hours fixing trivial errors.
So, I would like to introduce you to a critical skill you need as a developer (that you are already likely using). Then I would like to give you an example of how to apply this skill at different levels to get the most out of it.
The skill I am of course referring to, is googling errors.
What you might be thinking to yourself is “Of course I google stuff already how hard can it be”.
Well, I have found that you need to be very specific in what you are searching for, otherwise you could not only get an incorrect or irrelevant solution, but you may try something and it just leads you to get a different error than what you started with (highly annoying when this happens).
As a developer, you will likely spend at least 80% of your time looking stuff up so you can figure out how to fix it. So let’s talk about how you can be most efficient with your searches so you can resolve your errors in the smallest amount of time.
Below, I have encountered an error when trying to create a table in Amazon Athena to query some data stored in S3
There are a few different ways to search for a resolution to this (if you are not already sure what the error means).
I could go to google and search for “unable to create Athena table”, which gives me a bunch of generic solutions I would have to dig through and continue to try, likely leading to a lot of wasted time.
I could narrow down my search a little bit to only include AWS documentation by searching for “failed to create Athena table aws docs”, which gets me a little closer as the top result is a page from AWS docs about creating tables in Athena. However, I don’t want to create tables in Athena I want to figure out why I am getting this error.
To narrow it down to the point of usefulness, what I can search for is the specific error I am getting. So in this case I would parse the error I am getting and extract the useful bit, which is “[S3-crawler]: is not a valid table name”. After a search on google for “is not a valid table name athena aws docs”, I am lead to a piece of AWS documentation about names for tables, databases and columns. When reading about the naming conventions I see the following:
Looking back at my failed table create, I see that I used a “-” character, which as noted above is not supported. After getting rid of it and changing my table name to be S3crawler, it was then successfully created.
So by telling google exactly what I am looking for I get a desired result in a pretty quick amount of time. The moral of the story here is that you need to be very precise in what you want to find with your google searches, as there is a lot of information out there to try and filter through.
Hopefully this is helpful in saving you some time dealing with random errors you are going to encounter as a developer.
Remember, it is only a matter of time until something breaks or you encounter unexpected errors, it happens to literally everyone. So be prepared on how to best deal with it so you are not wasting a ton of time looking in the wrong places for the best solution.
As always, best of luck in your continued journey through Cloud Computing.
