[JackMorgan]

This advice is good only for people who naturally dive deep into the details and get lost.

What he suggests is what I do as naturally as a fish in water. Skimming the details, finding my answer, and racing off is my greatest skill. But, lately, I have realized _my_ 10x gains come when I bite the bullet and deeply learn a technology. It is against my nature, and takes real effort, but that is where my biggest gains are.

If you read this article, snort, and say, "duh", try getting a book on a tech you use and reading it cover to cover a few times. Try programming without internet for a few hours. I've been doing this lately, and my normal cycle of hitting Google every ten seconds to remember (is it length, count, or size...) has slowed significantly, which keeps me in flow longer. I get pulled out of flow less and I have learned some really useful features of my stack that I previously would have never learned.

[dmiladinov]

To sum your comment, and many others on this thread:

Don't let not knowing "simple solutions to simple problems" stop you from completing your next action (fixing the bug, finishing the sprint, launching the MVP, etc.).

Don't let not knowing the fundamentals better stop you from "leveling up", as it were, as a developer.

[Smudge]

> Try programming without internet for a few hours.

I've done this a couple times out of necessity (internet goes down, etc). It made me realize how useful a good IDE can be. Googling the API references is essentially a poor man's IntelliSense. Or, maybe, IntelliSense is a poor man's Google, depending on how you look at it.

[JackMorgan]

Sure, auto complete tools are great. What I'm talking about is being fast enough that even auto complete can barely keep up, combined with a depth of knowledge that allows you to make the wise strategic choices that cut out huge swaths of time and typing. Like the other day this other developer and I were trying to reorder columns of data and sort them by multiple groupings of aggregates in .NET. We were twenty minutes into what would have been hours of effort before I remembered reading about DataTables, which are in memory databases in .NET. We had our problem solved in a few minutes. No auto complete would have told me that, just careful, deliberate study.