Steal Code like an Artist - 3 Ways to Build Your Portfolio Using Tutorial Projects
During your learning process, you will get to practice tons of tutorial projects when learning new programming concepts. To understand these tutorials, you will also have to follow along by coding line by line.
At this point, most newbies discover that most of their projects are made up of other people's code!
Question: How do I build projects for my portfolio when I've spent so much time practicing tutorial projects? Should I copy and paste these codes as mine? After all I understand how they work.
The short answer is 'No'. That is called Code/Programming Plagiarism.
What is Code Plagiarism?
Code or Programming plagiarism is the act of using another person's source code and claiming it as yours. In code plagiarism, you simply copy and paste another developer's code and publish it as yours.
Get your hands out of the cookie jar!
Why You Shouldn't Plagiarize code:
Code plagiarism is hurtful to your journey to becoming a developer AND learning process for 3 solid reasons;
- It prevents you from learning new concepts in tech and programming
- It hurts your existing knowledge by preventing you from practicing what you already know
- It negatively affects your reputation as a developer (can you imagine a recruiter seeing someone else's code in your project portfolio?)
Instead of plagiarizing other people's code, you must learn to refactor code.
What is code refactoring?
Code refactoring is the process of restructuring existing code without changing its external behavior.
The point of refactoring code is to improve the design, structure or even how the code is written (implementation), while keeping the core functionality.
Now that the technical jargon is out of the way, let's get to the good stuff. How do we take full advantage of tutorial content without copying and pasting code?
Here are 3 strategies you can use to avoid code plagiarism; But wait…
Step 0: The Most Important Step
For these three techniques, you must achieve one crucial step before moving forward; Always follow the tutorial project verbatim to understand how the concept works (code inclusive)
Now let's begin!
Strategy 1: Take the core concept you've and learned and build something new
Every tutorial content whether video or blog post is centered on teaching a concept in programming. To help you understand better the content creator often explains this concept by building a project. As newbies to whatever concept is being taught, you might run into the common problem of copying the code verbatim just to understand how it works, and this is just fine as long as you take your learning a step further;
How to use Strategy 1:
Once you understand the code and the concept, write out how the project works in your own words. Find a problem similar to the one described in the project and use the new concept to solve it
Strategy 2: Add an extra layer of functionality to the tutorial code
This technique is not as intensive as the last but it works well in helping you avoid code plagiarism. If you can't find a similar problem to work on or you would rather use the project idea in the tutorial, a good practice will be to add an extra layer of functionality to the code.
For example, if you practiced a 'How to build a to-do list app' tutorial, to make the code yours, you can extend the to-do list app by adding a function to categorize the to-do items or you could enable the user add images to each to-do item, the possibilities are endless!
How to use Strategy 2:
Once you understand the code and the concept, think of a solution to make the user's life more convenient. Code this new functionality into the tutorial project
Strategy 3: Use a different approach to solve the problem
Just because a tutorial solves a problem one way doesn't mean you can't provide a faster and more efficient solution.
The point of tech and development is discovering more optimal ways of solving a problem. This presents a wonderful opportunity for code refactoring.
Suppose you are working on a ping-pong game coded in procedural programming style (standard programming style). Once you understand how the project is built you can re-write the code using object-oriented programming style (OOP). Re-writing the code in OOP will allow you incorporate objects into your code and prevent scoping issues.
There are so many ways to optimize existing code. Some examples are; reducing the amount of memory used, writing a faster algorithm, using more efficient data structures and so on.
How to use Strategy 3:
Once you understand the code and the concept, think of ways to optimize the tutorial code. Use a better approach to achieve the same result as the project tutorial.
In Conclusion
No matter how many blogs you read or how many videos you watch, you alone are the master of your fate, you pay the piper and determine the tune of your life.
If you are unsatisfied with where you are right now, nothing will change until you make the first move.
So make the first move!
Get the 5-step checklist to switch your career to tech right now!
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