When I first started programming professionally a few years ago I, like any beginner, leaned heavily on Stack Overflow.<p>When I became experienced I prided myslf on the ability to solve simple poblems with nothing more than my knowledge of the language, frameworks, and occasional trip through the reference manual.<p>Eventually I realized it was just faster to google those questions as soon as I had them rather than try to remember or solve simple problems.<p>Stack Overflow is useful precisely  because it lets me focus my mental energy on solving hard, &quot;real programmer&quot; problems like architecture and code organization.