CSS flexbox properties! 🙈

The really basic ones are fine, but is it align-items, align-content or what right now? Even if I used those props multiple times the same day already...

Fortunately, Chrome autocompletes the URL to the cheat sheet right as I start typing "flexbox" in the address bar. It knows me so well... 😅

One day I'll remember the parameter order of functions like strpos, in_array and array_search. That day is not today.

Some of them use needle first, some of them haystack. But I always find myself reaching for php.net because for the life of me I can't remember.

If an effort to get past some of this, I've started adding anything I google too frequently into Anki for me to study and memorize. I've found spaced repetition learning to be very useful.

It used to be that, if I wanted to hunt down every file in my repo with a certain bit of text in the code, I'd have to Google exactly how to phrase that in grep. Now, I just know to grep -rl "the string in question" /path/of/repo. I wouldn't say I've "learned grep", but I know that one command that is all I want 99% of the time. Little quirks of languages, remembering the order of things in bash commands, bits of APIs you need all the time--all of them great candidates for a flash card. If I weren't using an SRS system, I'd be wasting lots of time looking it up because I never memorized it.

There are still plenty of things I don't have memorized; but I keep adding to my study deck and, slowly but surely, cutting down on Googling.

Edit: for a good general explanation of spaced repetition systems, I recommend this interactive by Nicky Case.

There is certain functionality, like how to conduct basic operations on data structures, which I definitely know myself if I think hard enough about it, but I default to Googling it anyway. It's just easier to offload some of it to the cloud, especially if it's wordy.

For example getting a random value in a JavaScript array:

var item = items[Math.floor(Math.random()*items.length)];

That's wordy and kind of unintuitive. I don't even try to remember just how to do it.

In Ruby, for me it's probably simpler to remember:

item = items.sample

Of course, there are plenty of operations I similarly Google every time in every language including Ruby.

Any time postgres stops running on my machine, I go find this command:

pg_ctl -D /usr/local/var/postgres start

I probably could remember that, but I've never bothered.

The most basic thing that I look up is how to find the largest directories on a Linux workstation. I have been using Linux for about 6 years now and I still have to look up the du command syntax every single time I use it.

REGEX!! I simply can't remember the syntax. Also various functions from C standard libraries specially strtok and pthread_create

Right now, it's just basic terminal commands for me. Haha, total newb. But, I got my flash cards and am getting better. I trust these things will sink in eventually. 😄

The flags for untarring and unzipping a .tar.gz file

Amazon AWS tutorials. I find the organization of their console to be basically inscrutable even when I fully understand what it is I'd like to do—can be very hard to find and order the operations. And the docs are pretty rough from a clarity perspective so I end up having to look at three of them and a blog post to identify what's actually going on.

How to do certain stuff with Git and when to use git cherry-pick or git submodules.

Most of the times I search how to not add certain files in this commit and only few others without even git add those particular files

ActiveRecord query methods! All the includes, selects, joins, etc. AR has so many tricks that I can never remember them all so I am always Googling 😊

Linux grep and find options; specifically 'how to find text in a file globally'. I really should just make an alias.

Almost every basic thing you might want to do in Python. I’ve started using the language a couple of months ago and it seems to have its own quirks everywhere 😀

Unzip taz.gz.

Its one of that commands I literally use one time every three months and completely forget the flags every time i use.

How to reset branch contents to what's on remote 😐

PHP Date format. Every. Single. Time.

Lately I've been doing so much with react-google-maps I've bookmarked the docs page: tomchentw.github.io/react-google-m...