Efficient searches on Google for programming questions

Published: April 18, 2021

I got an error when I tried to develop software. What should I do now?

Software development is an amazing area to work but it has some challenges and requires steadily continuous learning. Today more and more people become software developers (the number of developers around the world was 21.6 million in 2019 and jumped to 24.6 million in 2020) and new technology and tools are released every day (Source: How Many Software Developers Are There in the World?). So, all the developers, but mainly the newcomers, need to have a skill to learn how to learn new things and how to learn things as fast as possible.

Like almost every profession today, the fastest and easiest way to solve concrete problems in software development is to simply google things. However, Google could bring many useless results among the good results. So, I would like to invite you, smart audience, to let me persuade you to use some simple but useful search string-building techniques (the term search string means the expression you write inside the Google search bar). Let's start with the classical learning challenge of all developers: you are trying to configure a MySQL database system for your web application then you get an error related to a connection. Let's see some techniques to overcome this problem.

If you do not have a clue about an error message happening to you, you can simply copy the main parts of that message, paste it on Google's search bar and dig on the results. When I speak about the main parts I mean the core of the content of the message, excluding memory addresses, your machine's username or filepath (please avoid using sensitive data on searching for your own security).

Probably there have been millions of developers that have searched about things related to that error message on forums before you. As most public forums are indexed (previously prepared for search) on Google's databases, you can easily find a good answer. Thus, copy the main parts of the error and Google it.

As we can see on the picture below, I had an error trying to configure a MySQL database system. This error has a main part 'Can t connect to local MySQL server through socket'. I removed all other words from the error and focused my search on those.