Do not Copy & Paste Code
As a programmers we tend to Google a lot of our doubts.
And if you know how to Google properly then 9 times out of 10 the answer is already there which can make us want to just copy and paste it on our editor and call it a day. In case you run out of luck and you are in the 1 out 10 ratio, you can always post your question on stackoverflow.com and a kind human being in other part of the world who also love coding, will be answer your question.
As programmers we tend to be a little lazy (in a good way), and that’s why we look for easy ways to resolve our problems.
However, while learning to code I realize it was not the best idea to copy and paste. The reason why is because you don’t memorize the basic syntax. I was just copy and pasting, and changing the name of the variables, classes or functions without really learning the small details on the syntax.
What happened was that when I got to do my first coding test I didn’t really move fast enough because I didn’t remember the syntax properly. A parenthesis was missing, I didn’t know a semicolon should be there, the name of my class was lower case etc.
Therefore, If you really want to learn and be more efficiently, use what you found on the web as reference and type your own code, this help me to improve my coding by a lot, be more efficient, resolving issues from different approach, and even to understand more abstract coding.
In addition to benefit yourself by not copy and pasting. I have to mention the consequences from open source libraries. These are free most of the time, but it doesn’t mean you can use their code freely. Most of them have licenses attach to them that if you use them on project it can cause legal issues and fines up to $150,000 in the United States. I suggested to get used to write your own code for all personal and company projects to avoid any kind of legal battle.
But… we are still programmers. Let me put you on a very interesting chrome extension.
It’s called Blackbox (https://www.blckbx.ai). This particular extension can capture text from videos, that way when we are watching a YouTube videos we don’t really need to be typing all of it, but we can copy and paste on our editor.
Let me show you a video to explain this better.
Cool, isn’t it?
Conclusion
While copy and pasting can be the best option if we are in a hurry, we feel lazy or we have deadlines to meet, these can has some consequences for your own learning and can get you in troubles in some occasions. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t copy. We can use certain information as reference and give them our touch. As Pablo Picasso said once “good artists borrow, great artists steal.”. Let’s be great artist and code at the best of our abilities.
