Friend told me to just copy-paste code instead of writing it from scratch

My buddy Dave who works at a startup told me last year that beginners waste too much time rewriting things that already exist. He said find a working snippet, test it, then tweak it for your project. I spent 3 months trying to code a login system from memory and kept breaking it. Finally tried his way and got it running in an afternoon. Anyone else have a friend who gave advice that actually worked?

2 comments

2 Comments

kim_nelson16d ago

My cousin Jim told me to start using npm packages instead of hand-rolling everything and I told him that was cheating... fast forward two weeks and I had ten broken dependencies and a node_modules folder the size of a small car. Took me longer to fix the version conflicts than it would have to just type it out myself. So yeah, great advice in theory, real fun in practice.

margaretw4116d ago

Wait, @kim_nelson did you end up giving up on npm entirely or just got better at managing it? I used to be exactly like you actually, I thought reusing code was basically plagerism. But then I had to build a simple search bar and spent two days writing date formatting from scratch. My friend was like "dude, just use moment.js" and I finally caved. Now I copy small utility functions all the time and it saves me so much headache.