The practice of copywork for coding
jasonleow • 28 Jun 2024 •
I’m deep in the hodgepodge school of self-taught coding now. Followed this YouTube tutorial series to learn how to code a PHP REST API app.
What do we do without all these coding content creators from India?! They’re the secret source—and sauce—of the programming bubble on the internet.
It’s a free resource, and they didn’t provide the code repository. So I had to hand-type them out line by line as I watch the video. It’s slower and more painful process of learning how to code. I distinctively remember doing this too for one of my first few Udemy courses on web development. The hand-coding felt like it distracted me from the video. So I have to replay it sometimes to get the gist of the task, then combine it with ChatGPT for it to explain the code line by line.
“What a waste of time! Why don’t they provide the code?” kept replaying through my head.
Initially.
But after while, I started to get the hang of it. Hand-typing it out character by character, line by line, started to make sense. It’s like how they say people learn better when they hand write notes during lectures, instead of typing it out on laptop.
David Perell and Sam Parr talked about the practice of copywork, of copying others’ writing by hand:
Sam Parr credits a practice called “copywork” for helping him build an 8-figure media business. He learned it from Benjamin Franklin, and it’s the way we used to teach kids how to write. The method is simple: have people copy others’ writing by hand. Simple as that — and doing so gives people a sense for a writer’s flow, voice, and rhythm. These examples in history stick out:
- Hunter S. Thompson rewrote every word of The Great Gatsby by hand so he could feel what it’s like to write a great novel.
- Ben Franklin used copywork to level up as a newsletter writer and get good at persuading people.
- Judd Apatow rewrote Saturday Night Live skits by hand to get a sense for what good joke writing requires.
- Jack London rewrote the works of Rudyard Kipling to master the art of storytelling.
So similarly, you get a better tactile feel of the new syntax, the rhythm of the new language. It aids recall after having typed out the same methods for the umpteenth time. It’s less efficient, more friction, but that’s the whole point. The friction aids the learning.
The practice of copywork for coding.
Comments
Back in the early 1980’s, computer magazines used to come with a section of printed BASIC code that you could type in manually at home to run a game or program. It was hard work and a nightmare if you missed a space or certain character somewhere along the way. I remember scanning through pages and pages of code to find an error. But it was also a good learning experience, seeing how the code worked and what sequence it was in. I like to think it helped me think more logically, even as a 10 year old learning about home computing.
I doze off when I learn laravel on Youtube, but pretty ok when the content is talk about AI.
@Winkletter I tried coding classes from my alma mater university, but it bored the hell out of me cos too academic. YT university is the way haha
@tao Wow damn that’s real analog. So cool.
@knight yeah most classes are boring
I took a night class once where we built a PHP MVC from the ground up, but I kept dozing off during the lectures and didn’t learn much. I should have signed up for YouTube university. Man, I hope I didn’t snore.