I also don't use SO that much, I never have. Maybe I google a few things once in a while and sometimes I stumble upon a StackOverflow page, but never to actually solve errors. It's usually to get a bit more insight out of curiosity.
Professionally, I work at Google and internally we have an extensive corpus of knowledge for various problems and programming patterns that really are tied to in-house technologies that don't really exist outside of the company. That's mostly the #1 reason why I almost never stumble upon SO.
> 1. What your programming set up is.
I code in Python, Bash, Haskell and sometimes Go. Plus a couple of internal languages that aren't really interesting (mostly config languages). I write code with vim and manage my project with tmux sessions.
> 2. What you do when there is an issue?
I look at the logs, look at the code, I look internally for any resources we might have, I spend some time trying to figure out what is going on and usually that takes care of 90% of the problems. If that is not the case, then depending on the type of problem (is it an internal library? is it something externally available?) I either ask on the internal IRC for specific teams in charge of that platform, or I go to the external internet in search for help. Most of the time, if that is the case, the situation is so specific that I can't really find an relevant answer on SO so I more often than not just end up in a #freenode channel for that library/language and directly ask questions to the interested people.
I don't know if it's the team I work with or a problem in general, but a lot of my time these days I spend on getting annoyed with developers who just keep reporting "it's not working". Hardly any effort in looking at logs/stacktraces and then mapping it back to the code - all of which they have access to. When asked for more details about the issue, I almost always get answers like "here's the place where we have the log files, can you look into it and tell me what's wrong".
It gets worse. I've known developers who will report merely that 'website blah is down'. They don't look at the logs and they don't tell me the actual error message that the browser receives.
If the error is clear then sure, look at the code. Many people seem to be bad at writing user friendly error messages though, requiring a search for what the message even means.
Professionally, I work at Google and internally we have an extensive corpus of knowledge for various problems and programming patterns that really are tied to in-house technologies that don't really exist outside of the company. That's mostly the #1 reason why I almost never stumble upon SO.
> 1. What your programming set up is.
I code in Python, Bash, Haskell and sometimes Go. Plus a couple of internal languages that aren't really interesting (mostly config languages). I write code with vim and manage my project with tmux sessions.
> 2. What you do when there is an issue?
I look at the logs, look at the code, I look internally for any resources we might have, I spend some time trying to figure out what is going on and usually that takes care of 90% of the problems. If that is not the case, then depending on the type of problem (is it an internal library? is it something externally available?) I either ask on the internal IRC for specific teams in charge of that platform, or I go to the external internet in search for help. Most of the time, if that is the case, the situation is so specific that I can't really find an relevant answer on SO so I more often than not just end up in a #freenode channel for that library/language and directly ask questions to the interested people.