I agree with what Vuild is saying here, but wanted to expand on one bit as well!
You said this in your post:
Everything I have programmed so far was a one to one copy of this tutorial
And it made me think about the difference between actually copying the code, and watching a tutorial and recreating the code. And I think there is a big difference between the two!
You probably could have gone to Github (or wherever) and found a completed project that already implemented the code you needed, and just copy and pasted it. And that probably would have got the job done.
BUT I think if you recreate the code in the tutorial, you are at least going through the physical act of writing the code and that helps you learn! Just cause it wasn't a completely original piece of code doesn't mean you didn't actually write it.
And I'll specifically say something about this question too!
Should you rather try to get through the documentation and try to solve everything on your own?
It obviously depends on the problem and you're comfort in the area, but one big factor is what your goal in this project is. Are you interested in getting a working project done quickly and well? Is your goal to learn? Do you like building things from scratch and don't have a time constraint?
All these come into play when for instance I decide how I am going to approach a project, and especially a side project.
I'll give a little example! My currently deployed blog is written in a Ruby framework called Middleman, and it works pretty well! I have a custom CI/CD pipeline setup and I like it. BUT simply having a working project isn't really my main focus for my blog. It's also a place for me to play around and learn new things! So I recently decided to rewrite the guts of the thing using Gatsby! I'm gonna get a few nice 'user' facing benefits out of it like better offline support, but that wasn't really what motivated my decision. I wanted to learn Gatsby and that was more important that the project I actually shipped. And also, since I already have an existing blog I have no time pressure to finish the rewrite. All that boiled down to deciding to completely rewrite the project in Gatsby. I'm gonna take my time and do it how I want to do it, (copying liberally from online resources and projects š) and learn a lot along the way.
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It really makes a difference if I simply copy and paste an existing code or working through a tutorial, despite it was exactly the same.
The result is what matters and if I work on this part of the code in the future, I will surely extend it on my own.
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I agree with what Vuild is saying here, but wanted to expand on one bit as well!
You said this in your post:
And it made me think about the difference between actually copying the code, and watching a tutorial and recreating the code. And I think there is a big difference between the two!
You probably could have gone to Github (or wherever) and found a completed project that already implemented the code you needed, and just copy and pasted it. And that probably would have got the job done.
BUT I think if you recreate the code in the tutorial, you are at least going through the physical act of writing the code and that helps you learn! Just cause it wasn't a completely original piece of code doesn't mean you didn't actually write it.
And I'll specifically say something about this question too!
It obviously depends on the problem and you're comfort in the area, but one big factor is what your goal in this project is. Are you interested in getting a working project done quickly and well? Is your goal to learn? Do you like building things from scratch and don't have a time constraint?
All these come into play when for instance I decide how I am going to approach a project, and especially a side project.
I'll give a little example! My currently deployed blog is written in a Ruby framework called Middleman, and it works pretty well! I have a custom CI/CD pipeline setup and I like it. BUT simply having a working project isn't really my main focus for my blog. It's also a place for me to play around and learn new things! So I recently decided to rewrite the guts of the thing using Gatsby! I'm gonna get a few nice 'user' facing benefits out of it like better offline support, but that wasn't really what motivated my decision. I wanted to learn Gatsby and that was more important that the project I actually shipped. And also, since I already have an existing blog I have no time pressure to finish the rewrite. All that boiled down to deciding to completely rewrite the project in Gatsby. I'm gonna take my time and do it how I want to do it, (copying liberally from online resources and projects š) and learn a lot along the way.
Thank you for your comment!š
It really makes a difference if I simply copy and paste an existing code or working through a tutorial, despite it was exactly the same.
The result is what matters and if I work on this part of the code in the future, I will surely extend it on my own.