Writing things from scratch?

TL;DR:

Value substance over status

My current twitter feed is taken over by this, i wrote xyz from scratch in c,rust,python etc…

don’t know but this feels not right, i mean like it has become some kind of trend, and where things are going feels wrong.

I am not against writing things from scratch, it’s great, one will learn lot of things, but the way it is being done now, it feels like people are doing it just to show off, and not to learn.

It would look cool, to put it in resume or to flex on the internet that i wrote this from scratch.

So at the end what happens or what process looks like this is, on the internet you can find lots of good blog series on writing things from scratch, one just needs to follow that, the author explains lots of things, but i have experienced that most of the time, that one just copy paste the code from that blog and just publish on the internet that i wrote this from scratch.

I have wrote lisp interpreter in rust, to learn rust as my first project in rust, my goal for this project was clear, i didn’t wanted to learn about lisp or interpreter, i wanted to learn rust, so i didn’t write it from scratch for, i just wanted to get more familiar with rust syntax and it’s vibe, i am not trying to prove or optimise anything, that’s why you would see there are lots of bugs and pending things in that project.

Am i saying writing things from scratch is bad thing??

fuck no!

one really understands things how something actually works when reverse engineered or rebuilt.

what i am against is there is fun, ecstasy, when you actually use something or work with tool or software and then you write it from scratch, that aaha moment, when you realise, that feature or that things works like this, you can see over the abstraction now, which you miss in copy pasting.

it’s best to write something from scratch if your goal is to learn more about that thing, or have some clear goal that i am doing this to learn this.

just following blog series mindlessly and copy pasting code is wrong.

what is other way(maybe)?

if one is following some write from scratch series, rather than copy pasting things, ask questions and explore them,

• why did the guy used this specific method or way, this could have been done much more easier way?
• in the past project i had simillar usecase as this function, can i use this in that project or that method would work better here?
• seeing things as adventure and open to exploring and following your curiosity wherever it leads.
• explore those rabbithole and see where it leads don’t close them.
• add your own vibe to the project, maybe you can add some feature or remove some feature, it’s your code and world make whatever you want to make.

it may stretch your project timeline more, but you will learn in more depth, and that’s what matters, because mind lessly following tutorial and creating things will make you shallow from inside in long term.