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Welcome to another developer fundamental video. I think you know what that means.

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"How's it going John?"

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"Not bad partner. Follow me I'll cover you."

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A developer needs to solve problems that there aren't clear answers to. 

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The best developers are the ones who are left to their own devices to figure out a problem.

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They are able to find errors in their code and solve it themselves.

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They have questions or something they don't understand.

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Well no problem.

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They know how to use the resources they have to figure it out.

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At the end of the day we are engineers.

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This is what we do and this is a developer fundamental.

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How can we solve this problem you're having when I'm not around to answer these questions for you.

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So how can you practice this?

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Let me introduce you to your most important resource

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as a developer: Stackoverflow. Stackoverflow is probably in the top five most used tools by any developer.

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Whether you're a game developer or a network admin a security expert or a web developer.

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Every day people in the field post questions you get answers from some of the best in the world.

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The website is so extensive that the question you have is most likely already asked and answered.

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I can't remember how many times stackoverflow has saved me when I was stuck on a problem.

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So in this short video I want to show you an important skill a developer should have - that is problem solving.

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In real life, You don't have a teacher or

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an instructor you can just ask for an answer every time you are stuck.

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No, most likely you have to figure things out yourself using the tools at your disposal.

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I'm not joking when I say most developers spend half their time on google.

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I want to start practicing that muscle.

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When you have a question ask yourself,

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"Knowing what I know and the tools at my disposal what is the best way for me to get to the end - to solve

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this problem?"

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The first step when you are stumped is to Google. And most likely one of the first links that pops up

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if you include the word Javascript or CSS or HTML 

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well most likely one of the first links will be stackoverflow.

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So let me show you an example and take you through a real life scenario.

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I've got a piece of text which is a string and I need to find how many exclamation marks it has.

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Well again just Google something along the lines of "check if string contains substring javascript".

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So I just Googled this.

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Let's see what pops up.

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And yeah we have a whole bunch of things, and you can see that the first two links are stackoverflow.

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So I would click on this and see that,

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all right the question is, you know, "I would expect a string that contains method but there doesn't seem

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to be one." well, Javascript doesn't have one.

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And people have answered this and you can see over here that there's a few things.

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One while there's 49 answers that's a lot there's votes, that's all this.

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It's active.

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I usually like looking at the both because the top answer will have the most upvotes.

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You can see here that this person has a ton.

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It also has a checkmark.

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This checkmark means that the person who asked the question has verified that this infact works.

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And usually I like looking at the top answer and 

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then kind of browsing through the second answer as well.

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Just make sure that I didn't miss anything because sometimes when new things happen this question might

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have been ask let's see when it was asked.

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It was asked eight years ago.

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Maybe the top answer since then, maybe Javascript included a contains method that we can use on strings

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and maybe the top answer now isn't exactly the top answer anymore.

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So I like scrolling through or making sure that you know maybe the first three answers are good but

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if you scroll up over here we see that this person actually kept updating their answer and even has

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the ES6 method "includes".

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So now that I know I see that, oh! I can just use the 'includes' function and with the 'includes' function

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I can just do something like this.

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I can say does the string

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"Helloooo!" with an exclamation mark.

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Well does "Helloooo!" have an exclamation mark?

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and I get an error, well because if I look over here it's not 'include' it is 'includes'. Let me try that again

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and I get 'true'.

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If I do a let's say an 'a'.

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I get 'false' because well, it doesn't including anything.

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So there you go stackoverflow

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just answered my question.

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And you can see over here there's a few other things that you can look at.

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One is, you can look at some of the comments that people have made and comments usually have votes as

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well so I like looking at comments with a lot of votes.

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And you can see people have provided valuable links.

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You also see that on the right hand side you have linked answer so maybe this page doesn't answer you

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but stackoverflow is smart enough to say, "Hey! maybe this is why you're looking for:" 

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and you have 'related' you have a ton.

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The last thing I want to point out is you also want to look at usually the person that's answering. 

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You see that 'Fabien' which has a lot of gold stars and a lot of points on stackoverflow,

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well this person answering.

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This person looks pretty pretty credible from all their stats.

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So that is most likely a good answer by this and actually know a few companies that look at stackoverflow profiles

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to see how good of a developer a person is, because if you're a developer that answers questions

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on stackoverflow and provide a lot of value,

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well, you must be a good developer.

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So remember this Googling and stackoverflow is very important.

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If you don't find the answer there you can create an account and 

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ask yourself the question on stackoverflow.

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But better yet go to the zero-to-mastery Slack chat

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and if your question wasn't answered on stackoverflow

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again, go to our community here and you have a ton of channels that you can ask questions in.

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For example if you are on channels of here you'll see all the channels that we have if you have

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Bootstrap questions, if you have Github questions, you go into the community and you ask all your questions.

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The Javascript channel is always always active.

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Very very helpful people on there.

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And remember you have a community of developers even after you're done with this course

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where they're willing to help you.

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So it is good to practice not just asking questions all the time but discovering answers yourself.

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Learn to debug your own code.

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Develop them muscle and you'll be a great developer.

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See you in the next one. Bye-bye