Chat with a barista in Portland made me rethink how I learn code

I was in line at a coffee shop last Tuesday and this barista told me she learned Python by breaking other people's projects on GitHub. Not like maliciously but forking repos and seeing what errors popped up. It hit different because I've been stuck watching tutorials for months and she learned more in 6 weeks of just poking around. Has anyone else tried learning by intentionally breaking code or is that a weird way to start?

4 comments

4 Comments

juliarodriguez1mo ago

Hate to be that person, but Python is just one language. She learned Python, not "code" like its one thing. Anyway, I actually did this with JavaScript once. Forked a todo app someone made and swapped out the CSS variables with nonsense just to see what broke. Found out the whole layout collapses without a proper color scheme because of cascading inheritance. Still remember that better than any tutorial about specificity.

karenb971mo ago

Totally agree, breaking things on purpose is the best way to learn! I did the same thing with a React app once, messed with the state management and ended up crashing the whole page in a loop. It taught me more about component lifecycle than any YouTube tutorial ever did.

fiona_kim16d ago

And yeah forking random stuff and breaking it is basically how I learned too.

phoenix_bailey1mo ago

Portland's like that though, random baristas dropping wisdom on you. @juliarodriguez you're right about specificity, I'll never forget CSS inheritance after watching a friend's whole site turn into a blob because of one missing hex code. That kind of hands-on confusion sticks way better than any lesson plan ever could.