[roedog]

I made my largest gains in programming competence almost 10 years ago when working on a system with no connection to the internet and no cell phone at hand. I was working a development assignment on an air-gapped network. Not being able to search google every time I got stuck forced me to actually read the documentation, man pages, and reference books and think through what was going on and come up with solutions. The internet terminal was a 10 minute walk away so I treated it like a trip to the library for research only after I had spent time working on the problem myself.

[fuzzfactor]

>I treated it like a trip to the library for research only after I had spent time working on the problem myself.

This is contrary to the (also true) conventional wisdom where _6 months in the lab can save you hours in the library_.

So you have to be careful.

But it can work exceptionally well once you've already been to the library a bit, you know better & better what it has to offer, when you do go back it's with a clearer focus on what you need, and you get the most out of it.