As a developer develops himself and progress, he find him starting to figure things out by himself.

Firstly, he would encounter problems to which there are no immediate answers. Google and StackOverflow can only help you this much. This would emerge only later for those mostly working on popular technologies. But for those who fight with legacy codebase, niche/greenfield technology or internal frameworks, this comes almost on day one.

Luckily, in case it’s not obvious, to find the answer on SO is not the only way mankind discovers knowledge. Gradually, when faced with a conundrum, an experienced developer naturally comes up with guesses to the root cause. And in case the guesses are proven wrong, one will have directions as to how to further analyse and investigate.

And he will figure it out.

The first few times, he might not be fully confident with this new, non-SO-oriented methodology. He might have the urge to really check his finding aginst authoritative sources. But soon enough it becomes natural. If I have proven it right,  then it’s not less truthy than if Donald Knuth had proven it right.

And as much as he would love to publicize the results to the world,  to both show off and save the effort of next inquisitors, he won’t be able to. Alas, he thinks, the next poor boy will have to go down this path all over again, until when Skynet is built and all human psyches linked together.

One example would be this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/34265459/atom-package-workspaceelement-activationpromise/34278296#34278296

A sign of maturity, I think.