Also, if you hate grocery shopping, you might be interested in the business I just started! I send people a weekly box with a suggested meal plan, recipes, and groceries, so all they have to do is cook. You should check it out! http://fortydollargourmet.com/peacemeals

After a few years in Web Development / Design, I thought I knew enough to cruise through most interviews without a problem. It was only when I sat down to my first “test” that I realised just how much I rely on Google. Thats not to say I know nothing, but all those little functions where you know what they do but can’t think what they’re called or the exact syntax – Google is always there to save the day.

That said, i think its a bit of a moot point for a commercial developer. The chances of finding yourself in a situation where you’re building a web app and don’t have any sort of web access is getting less and less likely. After my home internet connection went down one night recently, I found myself using mobile.google.com for the things I was getting stuck on! Thankfully I already had the PHP documentation installed locally, so I only needed to jump on a couple of times – but the fact is, the option is always there!

But… I know what you mean. I hate to think how productive I’d become if I had no access whatsoever to Googles index throughout an entire project.

It’s the same concept with writers and style guidelines. Or historians and encyclopedias. Taking the idea offline, how efficient would you be as an astrophysicist if you constantly referenced a set of encyclopedias, math books, and publications for every single detail of your daily work?

The internet can very easily be a crutch, in this way, because the barrier of use is so low. But it’s kind of a DRY thing… even though it may take literally a second to find the return value of an Array method on Google, how efficient are you really if you look it up each time you use it?

For your purposes, perhaps a mitigating concept would be: “If I’ve looked this up twice in my recollection, I need to memorize this idea cause I’m really wasting time.”

Just a few 1-cup-coffee thoughts.

When I was at school (the British kind, i.e. junior high and high) we were always having to memorise great chunks of Latin vocabulary, trigonometric expansions, etc. It was painful — but I was amazed how helpful it was to have all this fundamental information just ‘there’ in my brain.

I think I’ve grown lazy with my broadband connection. I waste time every day looking up the same facts over and over again (e.g. how do you do a zero-width negative lookahead in a regexp). If I learned all this by heart I would be far more productive. And then I could leave my internet connection on knowing that I’d only use it for obscure error messages and longer Ruby idioms.

Oh dear. I’ve just reasoned myself into some hard work :)