Am I really a developer or just a good Googler?

Step 1 read the docs (again.)

Step 2 look at somebody else's code: the library and its tests, another similar project, or whatever. Use the source luke!

Step 3 put a natural-language-ish query into google/stackoverflow.

When you're properly competent with the language and tools you mostly won't get to step 3. By the time you get there, you're looking for a specific piece of info, not a solution.

Once I decided I really wanted to learn to write code I just plain stopped with the copying and even referencing anything beyond docs or a thorough book.

I work to create a functional implementation of whatever it is I'm looking for, no matter how naive, convoluted or narrow my solution ends up being.

Only once that's done do I go about searching out solutions. Sometimes I'm delighted to find that what I've come up with comes very close to established solutions, other times I learn some new, concise way of going about the problem.

In any case, that first sort of experimental phase is incredible for informing everything that comes after. I'd say experiencing 100 less than optimal ways to do something is far more valuable than memorizing a single optimal solution.

Thing is, around the web, this sort of approach seems pretty ripe for ridicule as the Internet standard response is something like this [0].

There's a culture against discovery and creation. You either come out of the womb writing clever, idiomatic code and using or the hottest framework/library or you're an idiot.

0: http://harthur.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/771/

Nope. I remember specifically copying from known solutions in large organized reams of marked paper (a "book" we called it). They used to have whole rooms, and personnel, dedicated to storing them. Now, you couldn't just ask for what you wanted, like "clojurescript core.async examples". Oh, no. Research required either knowing how to search through the "books" or remembering previous solutions to similar problems. (And, I'm not that old.)