google documentation is so bad #coding #developer #softwareengineer #programming

[eledorusso]

Thank you for saying this. I thought i was just dumb reading google

[DrDiabolical]

And the weird part is, from the UI, everything looks simple and organised. Only when you start reading stuff, you go "wait... so.. huh... what is going on?"

[perfetti_codes]

Excellent take, It's not just Google's dev docs, honestly most of their docs for basic services like Gmail or Account mgmt are outdated and hard to search even for power users

[LadislavSoukup]

The same. Best Google documentation for any of their SDK is the source code - they often forgot to mention several functions or at least some option values...

[ravenecho]

Google auto centering ur active section in text boxes is toxic af

[deekshantwadhwa]

And they have so many versions, and ways, and requests for doing the same thing. If one thing works on one, the other thing doesn't, and of the other thing works on another then the first thing doesn't.

[EddiKh]

I come from SwiftUI… Flutter‘s documentation next to Apple‘s is a blessing

[thisoldproperty]

Most documentation is bad. Not just google. Frequently one has to reverse engineer, guess or just use brute force testing to find how interfaces/APIs work.

[sinkingboat]

yeah man. The other day, I googled Google, but I kept ending up at the start page. like wtf

[meezy]

I wasted 3 days trying to setup firebase. Moved to supabase and immediately up in 15 minutes

[subrahmanyamv]

Yes bro. Recently tried to get YouTube APIs working and had the exact same feeling. I have 15+ years experience. They just suck at documentation.

[WhyOhWhy]

I completely agree. I tired to learn flutter from their docs and just gave up and moved onto something else eventually

[ft_in]

Microsoft and some Apple Libraries have worse documentation than Google's imo, they only provide the declaration of the function/class

[olteanumihai]

This guy never tried Microsoft documentation. You dont know the luxury of google documentation till you use microsoft technologies.

[jam_]

It's weird because for grpc the docs are absolute trash, but for kubernetes it's awesome and one of the best I've read

[jackoberto]

I definitely relate to this. I'm currently trying to implement Google Play Games login with firebase for my Unity game.

There's separate documentation on Firebase and for the Unity plugin on Github. Both of which reference different methods depending on the version even though the latest version is a year old

[AbdullahWins]

Totally agreed.
It's so difficult, I had to work with map, calender, drive etc and it was a nightmare.

[rjk]

Gmail and Calendar API + documentation was the first API I used, and it took me forever to figure out, so I thought using API's was just difficult.. until I used Slack's API. From then on, I knew its just google's documentation that sucked.

[conundrumu]

Historically, Microsoft's documentation was the gold standard and I hated working on any other platform or tech stack. Now they're all shit. But Google docs, you can feel the pretentious self importance. It's always been shit and I've been a dev for 16 years

[arpitvasani]

I think it is due to gRPC they made it complex. fundamentally it is very simple but they had to chime in.
It has gotten easier for me over time. now it helps me keep junior developers away.