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Hot take: copy pasting code from tutorials for 3 months taught me almost nothing
Last Tuesday I was sitting in my dorm at UIC trying to build a simple to do list app in Python, and I could not write a single loop without googling it. That was after 5 months of watching tutorial videos and copying every line into VS Code like a robot. So I deleted my whole project folder and started over with just a blank file and one rule: type every character myself even if it takes 10 times longer. First week was painful, I got so many red error messages I wanted to quit, but by week 3 I could write a for loop from memory. Last night I wrote 40 lines of working code with zero googling and it felt better than passing any test I ever took. If you are stuck in tutorial hell right now, what is the one thing that finally got you out?
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jenny_lee4h ago
Struggled with this exact thing for way too long until I realized the problem wasnt the copying itself, it was that tutorials never made me sit with not knowing. When you follow along you always have the answer one tab away so your brain never has to actually hold the problem. The thing that finally got me out was picking something so specific and dumb that no tutorial existed for it, I built a script that renamed all my downloaded files based on what show they came from. There was no video to copy so I had to break it into tiny steps and fail over and over. For the first time I wasnt memorizing code, I was solving a problem. Deleting the folder was smart but the real trick is picking a problem that is yours and not the youtubers.
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