Alula ሐawando

My rule: The "3 google" rule.

productivity building

Here is a simple rule that I want to apply for myself.

I have been coding for years now. That means, I come across the same errors and issues repeatedly; more than you can imagine. And just like everyone, my go to strategy has always been to google it. Sometimes, this strategy is most effective if you understand your context, the problem, or the bug, and what you intend to do. What you search becomes clear and precise. Consequently what you get is quality too.

But what if you find yourself googling the same thing over and over again. For me that happens usually. In that case, it could mean one of the following:-

  1. You didn't understand the problem, the circumstance and solution the first time. You are googling mindlessly.
  2. The circumstance (situation) keeps on changing, and hence you are experiencing a different scenario. This is because you don't understand the root cause of the problem.
  3. The solution has a syntax, a method or approach that is unnatural (at least unnatural to the way you think). Hence your brain deems it useless and decides to forget it.

Now, what to do to deal with these problems.

My proposed solution:- The "3 "google" rule.

The rule is simple.

  1. If you find yourself googling for something more than 1 time,
  • You should get a prompt about it; to research it further to cover all the three scenarios above.
  1. If you google something more than 2 times,
  • You should get an alert that forces you to use your research from before.
  1. If you google something more than 3 times,
  • You should speak, and/or write about the topic. Why it is elusive and find a lasting solution.

But how would I do that? I would imagine that I will have to keep track of my search history. Well, corporate America is aleady doing it and it is benefiting them. In fact, my and your personal data is what is the oil well that is keeping the tech industry relevant. Do that data must be very valuable for advertisers. If it is so valuable for random corporations, it must be good to me to. However I have to leverage it in a way to felp me.

So, yes, I would have to dig into the web api. I kow there is a history API that is supported by multiple browsers. A quick search leads to this article at [mdn] (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History_API) and the history API.

The second one is what interests me the most