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A senior dev told me to stop copying code from Stack Overflow last week
I was on a call with this guy who has been coding for 20 years, and he said I was hurting myself by just pasting snippets without typing them out. He explained that muscle memory helps you learn the patterns better, especially for stuff like loops and conditionals. It hit me different because I realized I spend more time searching than actually understanding the code. Has anyone else tried typing everything from scratch and noticed it stuck better?
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susan_ward7d ago
Wait, hold on. You mean you were just copy pasting without even retyping the stuff? I thought everyone at least typed it out to avoid breaking their code halfway through. That's wild to me. I've been doing that for years not even thinking about it, just because my fingers have to move or I don't feel like I actually wrote the code. Good on that senior dev for pointing it out, but man, I'm kind of shocked you never tried it before.
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