Thanks to the current SEO nightmare, I can no longer use search engines the same reliability as before. Stackoverflow is too toxic and often all I need is to properly look up some more obscure stuff about some API, which “could just be googled”. AI, of course, is very unreliable.
Searching code on Github, then adjusting it in many ways to my needs (like to a different language, renaming variables to make more sense, additional optimizations, etc.) seems way more feasible nowadays. However, while there’s a lot of code with very permitting licenses (including public domain licenses), others are not so much, and I don’t want to argue against them, often I’m even understanding the reasons behind their decisions. I even try to give credit wherever I can, or look up the original source of an algorithm I find being referenced by someone else.
I’m not much of a coder anymore (and even then, it was self-taught hobby projects) but this is soooo good to do aside from just giving credit. I’d leave comments “I learned about this from here: (link)” so I could go back and reference it later.
I made a simple batch script to generate project folders at work and then a year later our standards changed…I would have had to start from scratch if not for the links I left because I forgot everything I learned