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STOP copying and pasting. Try typing every character in your CSS and never rely on external or pre-made libraries and you will learn what is, and more important
by err4nt 11y ago
STOP copying and pasting. Try typing every character in your CSS and never rely on external or pre-made libraries and you will learn what is, and more importantly what is not actually required for a layout to work.
In two years of adopting this policy in my own work I would say I learned as fact as the entire decade before that, where I was making quilts by stitching pre-made bits of fabric into one larger piece.
Don't be a quiltmaker any longer!
- WaltPurvis 11y agoDid you personally think up this quilting analogy for copy-pasta programming? Because it's pretty awesome and I want to be able to give due credit when I steal it.
- err4nt 11y agoI'm not sure what you mean. I was using things like HTML5 Boilerplate, Bootstrap, jQuery and a whole slew of plugins to build the things I wanted. Then I set a goal to type every character I delivered, and the only copy/paste I'm allowed to do are from my own snippets, which I have typed character-by-character. I got better at CSS this way, so I decided to do it with my HTML as well! Three years ago I couldn't write a line of JavaScript (though I could hook up, configure, and enable jQuery plugins). So I decided to just start _typing_ 100% of the JavaScript I would add to my projects instead of copying and pasting it in…two years later I'm writing vanilla JavaScript for everything I need and I haven't put jQuery on a project in months! If you want to get closer to a language (CSS, HTML, JS) stop copying from Stack Overflow, stop using libraries you don't understand, and either write it yourself or re-write your own version of somebody else's pattern and use that. This idea didn't come from another developer or advice or anything, I just set a personal goal to see how it would turn out. Now I highly recommend it to others too!