Had a chat with a senior dev that made me rethink how I learn code

I was stuck on a React tutorial for 3 hours last night and messaged a guy I met at a local meetup. He said I should stop following tutorials and just build something broken on purpose, then fix it. That hit me because I realized I've been copying code for months without actually understanding why it works. Has anyone else found that breaking things taught you more than following along?

2 comments

2 Comments

rayc381mo ago

Hell yeah, I totally get that! I spent like 2 weeks grinding through a Python course and couldn't write a single line without looking at the example. Then I deleted a semicolon on purpose just to see what happened and it clicked. After that I started breaking stuff left and right - changing variable names, removing brackets, putting loops where they shouldn't go. That's when I actually started understanding error messages instead of just panicking and pasting them into Google.

hayes.tara1mo ago

Oh man, I gotta respectfully disagree on this one! Tutorials are actually how I learned to build a solid foundation before I started fixing broken stuff. Breaking things is great later on, but if you don't know the basics of how hooks or state work first, you're just gonna get frustrated and give up.