Just as I use StackOverflow less and less, I also use google (search in general) less and less for development work. Sure every so often I get a weird error and

Just as I use StackOverflow less and less, I also use google (search in general) less and less for development work. Sure every so often I get a weird error and search for it, but I’ve been finding that less and less useful. A big part of it is that I don’t really use any hyper popular frameworks and libraries so there just aren’t many answers out there for what I do use. I’ve also grown accustomed to reading the language and library documentation and reference material, example code or the code I’m using itself. Recently, I’ve mainly been working on a niche Clojure project and a personal C++ game+engine project. For Clojure, I get along best with clojuredocs, the readme for whatever library I’m using and just reading the code. I only really found google/SO useful for Clojure in the early days when I was still learning it, but I’ve been writing Clojure for ten years now. For C++, I keep cppreference.org open and also the readme’s for the libraries I use (mostly header only libraries) and ill look at the headers too. The only library I’ve really spent a lot of time googling is the Bullet physics engine (it’s woefully underdocumented unless you’re using the python bindings). Any time I’ve tried googling for error messages, I’ve found it less than useful so instead I guess I’ve just gotten better at trying to understand obscure clang errors (usually template errors). I’ve also needed some help doing more advanced things with the EnTT library, but the author is very responsive on github and discord. In my previous job, I was mainly working on automating various AWS service interaction with terraform and python and while I did occasionally google for things, I almost always ended back on the terraform and AWS official documentation pages anyway. I also learned to program at a time when my internet access was irregular, so relied on offline copies of documentation for all my needs. Maybe that helped me rely less on quick fix searches, although I definitely went through a phase of that some years ago. As for the article, besides quotes for exact matches, I don’t think I’ve ever bothered with any of the other tips, in years if ever. Got on just fine without it ;-)