What is CodeCopy?

Fifteen years ago I began my journey as a young programmer.

It was summer vacation, I had been riding my bike through town when I spotted a garage sale. I pulled up, dumped my bike in the grass, and started browsing the dusty old boxes on display. Most of them contained random nick-knacks, stuff that any kid would gloss over. But one box was different. Inside it held a treasure trove of “ancient” computing gear that would eventually lead me to where I am today.

Inside that box I found a working Atari 400 personal computer, a B.A.S.I.C. programming language cartridge, a guide to the B.A.S.I.C. syntax, and a single issue of a magazine called Compute!

I learned to program in the most old-school way possible.

Sure, I had access to the internet at the time (although dial-up is just barely considered access). But there was something special about learning to program through this book and magazine. The Compute! magazine was filled with articles about old computers, advertisements for cassette recording systems (the precursor to floppy drives), but most importantly, it contained entire programs. Multiple pages would be dedicated to the source code for a single program, with only a leading paragraph describing the purpose of the code.

There was a sense of thrill to manually crafting these programs. Sure, it was painful. Miss one key, type GOTO 23 instead of GOTO 50 and you had to redo the entire program . But once you finished it, you had a complete program at your hands. The act of typing it helped me to memorize syntax, and with the aide of my B.A.S.I.C. manual I could learn syntax I didn’t understand. After finishing the program, I would go in and start tweaking it, seeing how things worked. Eventually the ideas started flowing for my own projects, and I was able to use what I learned to build games and “apps” on my own.

Tutorials today are dry.

You can only build a todo list so many times. It’s not exciting, and your missing the thrill of learning to program that I experienced as a kid. That’s where CodeCopy fits in. My vision for CodeCopy is to recreate how I learned to program, and make it available for today’s group of future developers. Interesting projects that are fun to write, hackable, and teach you along the way. I’m not going to force you type hand-type pages of code, but I do hope to create an exciting tool for learning to program, just like the Compute! magazine did for me.

So what’s next?

I’m working on the first project. It will be small and rough, but it will be a step towards my vision for CodeCopy. I’ll be relying on the feedback of anyone interested in CodeCopy, as well as contributions for future project ideas/posts. So please, get involved, and stay tuned!