Even if I can google programming answers or use stackoverflow, it probably takes 5 minute for me to get my answer. In other words, just because knowledge exists

Even if I can google programming answers or use stackoverflow, it probably takes 5 minute for me to get my answer. In other words, just because knowledge exists on the internet, it will take me a non-trivial time to retrieve these information. Rote memorization allows me to bypass the latency and allows me to get things done faster. The rest of my brain is focused on retrieving all my experiences on how to debug or knowledge or how the framework I am using interact. I use Google and stackoverflow as needed. My suggestion is to use SRS software like anki or supermemo and build your own deck of things to memorize such as how to get the size of an array, how to capitalize a string, etc. A good rule of thumb is to memorize anything you have to google twice. This will save you many 5 minutes of development time in the future.