[iroddis]

In the good old *nix days the system provided pretty much everything you needed: C, perl, man pages, and well documented header files. Throw in a couple of good books on programming, and you could do a lot.

That's still the case, but it feels like today's software development reality is different. There are endless frameworks, apis, devops methods, scalability concerns, and n+1 standards with which to integrate and keep up to date on. Knowing your language is only about 25% of the battle, and few projects are developed in a vacuum.

It's not possible to keep track of all those things, so endless internet searches are the end result.

[emadehsan]

web is so saturated, it is hard to turn off the internet if you want to put some distraction free hours of coding. There will be something you don't know

My guess is that OS programming (Linux etc) has not been affected that much form this overflow of redundent tools and you can stay productive offline?

[iroddis]

It's been a long time since I've done that kind of work, unfortunately. I still do have projects that I can be productive offline, most recently in rust ('cargo doc' is really amazing for this kind of thing).

It could be rose-tinted glasses, but I'd love to find a way back to the distraction-free coding days. Focus is by far my biggest battle these days, especially when running up against seemingly bizarre deficiencies (most recently, lack of unsigned 64-bit int support in postgres).

Hitting these kinds of walls almost always causes me to go wandering through distraction sites because I can't bring myself to build a bridge over yet another small discrepancy.