One very important skill you need as a programmer is how to find answers to your questions.
I am a programmer since .. I don’t know, 20 years? And professionally since more than 10. And yet.. I search on Google all day long for answers to my problems.
Everyone does it, too.
Our field is so vast and complex and filled with edge cases that it’s impossible to know every one.
Luckily, people working with computers happen to like connecting with each other over the Internet, to share little bits of knowledge.
And over time, we have built a vast amount of material on how to solve the problems we have.
Some sites focus on the question and answer “thing”. Like Stack Overflow, which is a place that was able to gather lots of programmers and let them create the awesome content it hosts. You have to learn how to navigate that site, because not always the best answer is the first, or the one with the more “likes”.
Another great resource of course is Google. Google lets us search on the bigger pond, the one that’s created by individual developers, independently, using blogs.
My blog is one of those sites that people happen to find on search engines. Lots and lots of other programmers have their own blogs. I wish for a future where everyone has a blog where they detail and talk about technologies they work on, so future people can then go and maybe learn things, solve their problems and so on.
Searching on Google is also something that needs to be learned. For example, not everyone knows that using the - key, we can exclude words from a search. This is very useful to filter results that are unrelated to us.
Or using the site:flaviocopes.com string in the search can limit search to one particular site. There are more “tricks” like this.
Most of the learning on how to search for information comes over time, with experience.