Hot take: I stopped copy-pasting code from tutorials and started typing it by hand, and it finally stuck

Vera Knight · 2026-10-26T01:15:04.541131+00:00

I spent about 3 weeks stuck on basic for loops, just copying stuff from YouTube and wondering why nothing made sense. A guy at my library's Saturday code meetup in Akron told me to close the video and retype every example from scratch, mistakes and all, then fix them myself when they broke. The first night took me 90 minutes to get through what used to take 15, but I caught 4 typos I'd been copying over for a week without noticing. Turns out my brain needed my fingers to hit the wrong key so it would remember the right one. Anyone else have a trick like this that felt dumb until it worked?

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Hot take: I stopped copy-pasting code from tutorials and started typing it by hand, and it finally stuck | Coding For Beginners - Free To Speak