I believe that this is the greatest time to become a programmer. Whereas I remember paying 149$ for an undocumented Microsoft Visual C++ 1.0 twenty years ago, almost all languages and tools have now become extremely accessible, free and well documented. The amount of information that one can find online is bewildering. We now speak in exabytes. There are more tutorials out there than you could read or watch in your lifetime. As a coder, I also doubt that you will find many algorithms in your code that have not already been analyzed and cleanly displayed online. To illustrate this, StackOverflow currently has about 8,3 million questions. 8.3 million… Just think about it for a second… There are 48 times more questions than the number of words in the English dictionary! And while this includes many duplicates, there are still new questions pouring in every day. This means that any time I have a question on any specific code subject, I can be 99% sure that I can find a perfect and constructive answer on StackOverflow along with instructive comments. And while this is in part a wonderful thing, I think that this has turned a lot of us into code zombies, coders who reach their objective without understanding the problem or thinking about the solution.

Like a growing disease, I feel that this has become a growing trend. With so many quality answers at our disposal, developers quickly make the huge mistake of taking away the most constructive part of the problem solving equation: the path leading to the solution.

Now, I am an utter fan of Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. I was closely watching as StackOverflow was being built and seeing their hardware specs, I believe that it is one of the greatest website implementation of all times. I am in no way encouraging you to stay away from it. But if jumping to StackOverflow is the first thing that comes to your mind when faced with a new problem, you are clearly missing out on the best part of programming.

A lot of people tend to rush to StackOverflow for every question they have. Some even hope for a nice prebuilt jsFiddle where they can view the results before even looking at the code. They justify this by time constraints, or by not wanting to waste energy reinventing the wheel. They wrongly believe that they would be wasting time by finding a less-optimized solution than the most upvoted answer out there. They merely think about the problem, and tackle each new algorithm like someone who solves crossword puzzles with the answer page left open. They are delegating the research part of their jobs. While they may still be learning a bit by looking directly at solutions, they learn a lot less, if not nothing, compared to the ones who go through the “painful” process of laying down the problem, thinking about the solution, coding the answer, testing it out, optimizing it and then comparing it with the top answer from StackOverflow.

Bringing research back into your code.

A coder can only become a master of his craft through time and experience, tackling each problem through solution-seeking, testing, error making, hitting walls, going through eureka moments, rebuilding wheels, compiling, and perfecting its own code. Not only do I think that each step is crucial as a learning experience, I also believe that it is vital for personal satisfaction and well-being. In fact, I truly believe that a coder can only be satisfied with its job when the latter stimulates its intellect and forces him to learn something new every day. Depending upon your current tasks, you may or may not be faced with a lot of unknown each day. Here is my personal approach to the problem :

When faced with a new problem, don’t hop on the Google wagon right away. Give yourself at least 10 minutes to try and solve it by yourself. Take a piece of paper, draw the solution, open a source file, code, compile, test. 10 minutes is not a lot of time, and you will quickly see that the investment pays off. When looking for information, look first at the official documentation instead of trying to find the direct answer on StackOverflow. The docs usually give detailed and updated information that will help you understand what needs to be done to tackle the problem. When you find something useful, write about it. Keep a journal, a blog or some written notes about your discoveries. When giving out a solution on StackOverflow, do not just spit out a jsFiddle answer. Point towards the right direction, write in pseudo-code, help the coder help himself.

If you have become weary of just gluing code together or feel like a zombie writing code, I promise that if you strive to bring research back into your code, you will discover a renewed, instructive, and rewarding experience.

Cheers