Talked to a kid at the library who made me rethink how I learn code

I was at the public library downtown last Tuesday killing time between jobs, and this teenager maybe 16 asks if I know Python. I say a little, expecting him to ask about some course or tutorial. Instead he tells me he learned by breaking other people's projects on GitHub and then fixing them. Said he never watched a single video or read a whole book. Just picked random repos, broke them on purpose, and figured out how to patch them back together. That hit different because I've been stuck in tutorial hell for like 8 months watching videos and copying code without really understanding it. His approach seems risky but honestly more practical than what I've been doing. Has anyone else learned by just breaking stuff first?

2 comments

2 Comments

angela6871mo ago

You had a buddy try that? My friend Mike did something similar with video games. He would download mod files and mess with the code until the game crashed. Then he had to figure out how to make it run again. He said it was frustrating at first but now he can read code almost like it's English. He works as a web dev now and swears breaking things taught him more than any class ever did. Might be a weird way to learn but it clearly works for some people.

hayden_nelson851mo ago

Yeah that's basically how I learned too (but with coding websites instead of games). I'd grab a template, break it on purpose to see what happened, then try to fix it. It felt like I was just messing around but after a few months I realized I actually understood how the pieces fit together. The trial and error thing really sticks in your brain way better than reading a textbook. Your friend Mike gets it - breaking stuff isn't stupid, it's just another way of teaching yourself what not to do. I still learn new things by deliberately crashing my own projects and then piecing them back together.