To whom do I owe any programming success I may have in a given day? My education? My wonderful peers? The shriveled wad of grey goo in my head? None of the above.

My search engine. DuckDuckGo. Google. Wikipedia. Hardly a problem exists that can’t be assisted in some way by a quick search.

How do I use Google Go (answer)? How do I use tags in cucumber-cpp (answer)? How do I brush my teeth without toothpaste (answer? What’s the deal with airline food (answer)?

It’s all so easy. It’s right at your fingertips. A proficient programmer these days has to also be a proficient “Googler.” However, a programmer’s job description is not “copies all code from the internet.” Although the odds are high that someone has had a problem very similar to yours, you need to be able to take that code as an example and adapt it to your current situation. If that weren’t the case, I think we’d be losing our jobs to high school kids pretty quickly.

So at the end of the day, make sure to be thankful to your search engine. Buy it flowers, make it dinner, rub its feet; just let it know how much you appreciate all the hard work it does for you when you do nothing but ask it silly questions all day.