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Reading Code or Writing Code

Published: October 23, 2023

Modified: February 26, 2024

Duration: 1 min

Words: 214

Two of the advice, you hear from experienced programmers are the followings

  • Write code or make project
  • Read existing code

These two advice are so profound that you can't fully understand them until you write and read enough code.

But there is something bugging me. What is better?

Of course writing code and making project, right? It seems that way. But we don't have enough time to write many types of software that will make us a software engineer.

For example:

Suppose you are building a project to learn Django, after you finish does it make sense to make a project like Django itself. Well yes, if you do you will learn a lot about it. But the problem is Django is not a small software that you can alone write in a reasonable amount of time. The better approach will be read the Django source code to learn about how Django works.

Right now, I am following this approach. Write a lot of code to learn and solidify your skills. But there is some project you cannot write alone in a reasonable amount of time. The better thing to do in this case is to read code, understand and maybe implement in a smaller scale.

Anyway this is just my opinion.