I just watched a video on how to make modern websites and I’m feeling a little inspired to provide my own feedback and assessment on the topic.
Here’s the original video for reference:
What I would add to this would be this:
Learn how to do it, then understand how to design it.
Basically, after you copy good websites, you want to make something impressive you can call your own. To do that, use what you learned.
Reiterate. Reimplement. Change, fix, or improve.
Something could be done different. Picking apart will help you understand why they did it the way they did it. Maybe they had a good reason to do it that way. Or, maybe they didn’t know any better. Or, maybe they weren’t getting paid enough to do something different.
Copying is when you learn how to do it, but ripping it apart and rebuilding it into something new is when you learn how to design it.
“But isn’t that missing the point? Isn’t the whole purpose that the video, and web development as a field, to learn how to do it?“
No, not at all! Don’t confuse purpose with point. The point of developing any skill is to know how to do something. Doing, however, doesn’t improve you in a meaningful way, not even in terms of a paycheck! If you can mimic as an approximation, you are a less efficient, more costly version of an LLM. You’re a template. A pre-arranged set of assumed totals.
The purpose of developing skills is to be able to build upon, to comprehend something. To grow, and learn. To shift and improve incredible, novel ways. The purpose of skills are understanding.
Let me put it another way: You don’t study for a math test to get a good grade, you don’t even study for a math test to graduate school. No! You study for a math test because you have self-respect. You study because you want to assert what you already hold of value within yourself. When your grade falls short of what you feel you put in, it’s your integrity – your inner worth, that is injured.
I should know! I’ve been the guy who doesn’t study. Heck, I’ve been the guy who was “proud” at the fact of getting a bad grade on many math tests; My thinking at the time was simply a matter of “If I can’t be proud of being the best, I can certainly get attention by being the worst!” It’s a phase in my life I still grimace and grit my teeth at, any time it comes to mind. It was simply a means to match my grade to the value and esteem that I held myself to.
Later, when I actually began to apply, and to try my best to study I did so because I didn’t want to be looked down on. I did so because I didn’t want to feel useless and worthless. I did so because I wanted to learn something valuable and crucially important; so I could value myself and to become important. I did so because I valued the merit and importance of the subject, and wanted to value myself in that same regard.
Please then, leave mimicry to robots and small children. Leave impressions and “doing” to the helm of actively learning. Your purpose is not, cannot, and never should be to simply to do, but instead to accomplish! Your purpose, the value you put upon yourself should be in terms of design ; in terms of mastery ; in terms of expertise. And that is why it is said that “copying is bad”. Copying isn’t bad as a means to learn from, and or to develop and grow by.
Copying is bad as a means to an ends.
Your means are wonderfully infinite.
Your ends are to design, not to simply to do.
Take pride in whoever you are, and what you have done. Have pride in the value you have for yourself, and do not be bashful to want more for yourself. To possess these things is to say that you acknowledge your inherent value.
For the doer, however, their value cannot ever be separated from the mere act of “do, or do not”. Their merit cannot go any further than simplistic “pass or fail”. The man who aims to learn is the one who will never be done, but will always be fulfilled. The one who aims merely to accomplish is the one who will cyclically be in a state of doing, but never succeeding. Working, but never accomplishing. Acting, but never thinking, or learning, or growing. His hunger will be of a literal sense. He is the kind of man who can never sit down because he never bothered to learn to stand.