When Ctrl+C from Stack Overflow felt like winning a championship
It was 2018. I was sitting at my desk, probably at 1 AM, staring at a screen full of red error messages. My coffee was cold. My energy was low. But I was alive with purpose.
I had just started coding. And I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, looking back, was the most beautiful part of it all.
We Just Started Writing Code
There is no AI assistant to complete our sentences. No tool that would look at our broken function and gently explain, “Hey, you forgot a semicolon. ” We just… opened a blank file and started typing. Badly. Confidently. Both at the same time.
The IT and coding field was booming. You could feel it in the air. Every article said, "Learn to code.” Every YouTube video promised you’d land a six-figure job.
The Stack Overflow Ritual
Let me explain to you a picture of what solving a bug looked like before AI.
You hit an error. Your first instinct: Google the exact error message, quotes and all. You land on Stack Overflow. You scan five different answers, all written by people arguing in the comments about which approach is “proper.” You don’t understand half of it. But then there comes an answer with a green checkmark. 3744 upvotes. Posted in 2012, still relevant in 2018 because some things never change.
You read it once. Twice. You look at your code. You look back at the answer. You copy it. You paste it. You hold your breath and press Run.
It works.
And I’m not exaggerating when I say that feeling was euphoric. You’d lean back in your chair as you’d just solved a theorem. You’d want to tell someone. Anyone. “I fixed it.” The fix was one line. It didn’t matter.
That Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V moment felt like we had hacked the universe.
Reading Documentation at Midnight
Here’s something I miss deeply: reading documentation like it was a novel.
The Golden Era Timeline
2018
First “Hello World.” First error. First Stack Overflow panic. First small victory.
2019
Started understanding why the Stack Overflow code worked, not just that it worked. A turning point nobody talks about enough.
2020
Spent pandemic hours deep-diving into official documentation. Read changelogs for fun. Built things that broke in new ways.
2022
AI coding assistants started appearing. The era of “just write it myself and figure it out” began its slow, graceful sunset.
Now
Looking back. Missing the struggle. Grateful for the tools. Wondering if the new generation will know what it felt like to truly hunt for an answer.
Why It Felt Like a Golden Era
It wasn’t golden because it was easy. It was anything but. It was golden because every answer felt earned. Every bug you fixed, you understood not because a chatbot explained it in plain English, but because you’d spent forty-five minutes tracing through it, reading, testing, failing, and finally figuring it out.
The IT field was expanding at a speed that felt almost mythological. Every month, new frameworks. New languages are gaining popularity. New companies are being built on code written by people who, just two years ago, didn’t know what a variable was. It felt like the wild west,and we were riding in it.
Did this bring back your memories? 🙂
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