Howdoi Mentorship

Every now and again I miss the library. A hall of wisdom, quiet and serene, with stacks and stacks of worlds to explore. Nowadays, the internet has largely replaced the role of trawling through shelves of books and reams of microfilm.

Software development, once a bastion of deep thought and planning, has in the modern era been reduced to the tying together of disparate APIs and the inevitable Quest for the most pertinent StackOverflow page. Howdoi, a simple tool for finding answers to common programming questions, was largely a response to the seemingly never-ending shuffle between the code editor and the web browser. When spending time in the latter, there’s a pretty good chance you might find yourself distracted from the task at hand.

This summer, as part of Major League Hacking, I helped mentor students from all over the world in contributing new functionality and general improvements to howdoi. Among the myriad commits was support for stashing commonly used answers, JSON output (perfect for integrating howdoi into other applications), an improved caching system to speed up development and reduce rate limiting while using the tool itself, code editor integrations including a VSCode plugin, and a bunch of smaller improvements that make the whole shebang more ergonomic.

Big thanks for everyone for their contribution, and for helping folks all over the world become better programmers with howdoi! If you’d like to lend a hand or have an idea, drop me a line on the issues page.