A Little Hydrofoil

While taking a short break today, I flipped over to Robin Sloan's interview on the Setup. Now Mr. Sloan almost broke the Internet a few days ago with his book review in Javascript. In his interview for the Setup he described how he sees himself as a programmer,

I imagine professional programmers as jumbo jets, capable of cruising smoothly and swiftly at altitude for hours, no internet needed; by contrast, I'm just a little hydrofoil kinda bumping along, held shakily aloft by the ground effect of online documentation, code snippets and tutorial blog posts.

I totally identify with his analogy, and would wager most "jumbo jets" feel the same way. I think this ties into why I agree so strongly with Alex Sexton's tweet from earlier this year (hat-tip to Motherfuton for the RT),

I think being skilled at debugging is probably more important than being skilled at coding.

Programming is problem-solving, hence my constant dips into Stackoverflow and Google. To extend Mr. Sloan's analogy a bit more, even Jumbo Jets need maintenance and fuel.