Obvious Advice That Isn't Obvious - Read the Documentation!

Hi! I've been developing with Python for quite some time... roughly 8-9 years now, if I remember correctly. I also develop in JavaScript, HTML/CSS and C/C++. I fancy myself an incredibly okay developer in JavaScript, a better than average developer in Python and farily awful but learning developer in the others.

I'm making 2022 the Year of RTFM.

I realized a while ago that I had "learned" a lot of the languages and frameworks I've used wrong... meaning, I hadn't learned them at all! I understood how each line of the code worked, so I was definitely above the level of "script kiddy" but so much of the code I wrote was just copy/pasted lines I had learned elsewhere, whether that code was literally copy/pasted from StackOverflow or figuratively copy/pasted from my head.

Take today for example. I've written API's in Flask... easily 2 dozen times in the last several years. I still have to consult the 'Getting Started' material, and since this is the Year of RTFM, I decided to take some time away from developing Malparse to actually read the docs... and that's when I learned about Flask factories!

Factories are a stupid useful feature in Flask that could've saved me loads of time, and will save me loads of time on Malparse and a couple of other projects. Literally the feature has been there for ages and I just... haven't read the manual to learn it.

So, let my life be a cautionary tale... If you haven't read the docs of your favorite language, framework, library or tool recently... chances are, you're missing out!