Why Copying Code from Stack Overflow Is a Skill (Not a Shame)

I copied code from Stack Overflow yesterday. I'll probably do it again tomorrow. After 10 years of professional development and 20+ shipped apps, I still copy code from the internet. And I'm not embarrassed about it. But I used to be. When I was starting out, I had this idea that "real developers" write everything from scratch. That if you needed to look something up, you were somehow cheating. I remember minimizing my browser window when a colleague walked by because I had three Stack Overflow tabs open. Like I was hiding something. That was stupid. The actual problem isn't copying The problem is copying without thinking . There's a massive difference between these two developers: Developer A finds a solution on Stack Overflow, pastes it in, sees that the tests pass, commits it, and moves on. Developer B finds the same solution, reads through it line by line, looks up the one function they don't recognize, adjusts the variable names to match the project's conventions, and then commits