I’ve been playing music almost as long as I’ve been writing code. I think I wrote my first line of BASIC about 2 years before I got my first drumset. I even spent a number of years studying classical and jazz guitar at the college level. I remember those long days in the Dana School of Music practice rooms. Four hours of practice a day is what the professors expect from you. For me, many of those hours were spent trying to learn to play jazz guitar solos by ear. Slaving away trying to get every note correct, not because I wanted to play those solos for an audience, but because that is how you learn to play like the greats.
Programmers also know that if they want to be good, they have to spend a lot of time at their craft. We tend to be more pragmatic then musicians however. Programmers spend their ‘practice’ time working on open source projects, reading O’Reilly books, or on original applications. What about trying to perfectly copy an application that you love? Sometimes programmers do this, but it usually has a practical reason. They don’t want to pay for a piece of software that they feel is overpriced, so they write it themselves. Or maybe, that software isn’t available for a certain platform that they prefer. And sometimes they even just plain think they can make something better or cheaper and take an existing product’s market.
I’m going to try something different. I am going to copy applications that I like solely for the purpose of building my chops. After the fact maybe I’ll find something useful to do with the code, but it will have no impact on what apps I copy. The first app on my list is Stackoverflow. I’m going to use Ruby on Rails with jQuery. Again my goal here is not to have a profitable or useful product. It’s just a really good way to learn Rails, jQuery, and CSS. My iPhone development day job doesn’t gain me much experience with these tools, and I would like to get much better with them. I think copying a site like Stackoverflow feature-for-feature is a great way to learn. I’ve already easily doubled my skills in CSS. Although that only means going from about a 2/10 to a 4/10. I’ve got a pretty good clone of the front page.
CSS example
We’ll see if when I’m done I regret my decision. Maybe my time would have been better spent fixing that bug in GIMP on OS X, or starting a company. Who knows?