It's nice to hear this kind of device review from a corner you don't usually hear it from. Rather than the usual kind of review broken up into the usual sections, maybe a storage, space, benchmarks, screen, software kind of thing, we have a guy who has specific use cases for it talking about how he used it for those cases, what worked and what didn't. And then comparing it to how he normally does those kinds of activities.

Even though I don't have the same use cases as him, I feel like I got more out of it this way.

Let me give a non-programming example.

It took me the best part of the weekend to drill twelve holes for curtains - because it is not enough to Google for the answers.

Now, if you knock on a wall and it sounds hollow - you just google for hollow wall fixings. Great. I'll go buy some of those.

Drill into the wall. And hit brick behind the plaster. Err... Ok they have invented a new type - dry lined Walls. The gap is so small my umbrella fixings cannot open up behind the board.

So I will get longer screws to go in the wall. But now my masonry drill slips on hard stones and gouges chunks from the plaster. Try harder - is that smoke coming from the drill? Eventually I find a consultant ( in the DIY store)

Aha - it's not masonry drill bits you need - you need aggregate drills. And a new drill.

Eventually I bought new drill bits, a new drill, six inch screws and I can do chin ups on the damn things.

The lesson

1. Until you understand the fundamentals of the problem, you will make poor choices time and again. Google correctly told me where to buy masonry drills and plasterboard fixings. It did not know to ask if I had the right walk for that.

2. New technology changes "embedded knowledge" - I learnt to drill brick walls from my father, But new ways of using the old can change everything.

3. Hire a professional while you go and do revenue generating work.

Yes and no. I'm a co-founder of http://devbootcamp.com so I see this every day in the context of people learning to be programmers.

"The best programmers I know understand how to architect and build large projects piece by piece. They can focus on the macro because don’t get hung up in the pieces. They know how to use Google to find solutions fast. DRY."

I agree with the first and second bit and strictly speaking the third. That is, when students first watch me code they're surprised both that I'm looking up this-or-that ActiveRecord method and at the speed with which I do it. They assume expert programmers have a book of magic spells they've memorized, so to see what I haven't in some ways makes it more magical.

What am I doing, then, if not memorizing every last little thing? What makes me a "better" programmer?

The key to becoming a non-beginner are the first two bits, not the third. It's developing that filter experts have which separates relevant information from irrelevant information. Lots of beginners use Google in a backwards sort of way, having been trained to "look for the solution." Google is like the great universal answer key for them.

It can't be about memorization, then. Being an expert is more like having this amazing compression algorithm at your disposal and we can evaluate very quickly whether some piece of information is compatible with that compression algorithm.

It's made worse by the fact that they see experts do it, sometimes. Or worse, that experts tell them, "I use Google all the time, you should, too." But Google is worse than nothing if the beginner finds code, copies it blindly into their project, and shuffles characters around until it does what they want. They are robbing themselves of the opportunity to abstract out common patterns, recognize similar problems in different guises, and generally setting an impossible bar of having to memorize too much.

Lots and lots of students have been trained to see software development as THAT.