What to do when Stack Overflow is down?

The Internet is awesome. Information at your fingertips and always-available help from people all over the world is one of humanity’s dreams come true. I’m not sure if the ancient philosophers included copy & pasting of code snippets in this dream, but it’s a fact of daily developer life.

It’s awesome, and it’s very convenient.

But this is not how you learn and become great at thinking for yourself, finding solutions for solving programming problems and most importantly how to be creative. Over-using sites like Stack Overflow will not make you a better developer, it will only make you very good at clicking up-vote buttons and copy & pasting.

You owe it to your brain and future self that you try to find a solution first, and not give up just because something doesn’t work the first time you try it. Especially when you don’t feel comfortable or knowledgeable, because you’re working on a new project, with a new programming language or different development environment. Humans are built for exploration and understanding by doing. Your brain will reward you for discovering things. The rewards are higher as the problem is harder (for you) to solve.

That doesn’t mean to ban forums and answer sites from your bookmarks. You can and should share your discoveries and see how others solved similar problems. You’ll probably find that there’s (hope my cats won’t hear this) more than one way to skin a cat. Sharing will likely lead to new, better ways to tackle a specific problem, and this will benefit lots of people.

All because you spent 10 minutes thinking about a problem and not just copy & pasting the first answer that somewhat works.