Even though I went to a decent CS school, I was still taught with the mentality of programming with puzzle pieces. By puzzle pieces I mean, looking up code segments at each step of the development process and adding them together as needed. Eventually gathering all of the pieces and having a properly working program.

So as an example, if in my program the next step is to tokenize a string, I go to google and search "how do I tokenize a string in language". All instead of critically thinking about its implementation.

I personally don't think its a very good way to program and I always seem to forget everything that I have searched for. So how can I get out of this puzzle piece mode of programmer that I was taught.