I am a developer in a good company. I was given a task by my company to accomplish within a week however I finished the same in 4 days, my boss, the client, and other team members all are happy by my work; even I was! However suddenly I got a thought in my mind: “For my work I took some code from internet and mixed it up with my programming and gave the result faster however, my worry is that I should have done the task all of my own so that I would have a better understanding of it (even which was taken from internet)”.
Can anyone tell me if I am ruining my programming career this way (I mean by using others code)?
7
Probably not. Getting parts of solutions online is not that uncommon. If you don’t understand what you are copying and pasting from the internet, you will eventually run into trouble. If you take a little bit of time and effort to learn about the code you find and how to adapt it better to your own circumstances, that is fine!
4
There are two sides to this issue that you need to watch out for. On the one hand, don’t reinvent the wheel. On the other hand, avoid licensing traps.
The internet is a great resource for getting code to do things quickly. There are all kinds of useful libraries and other utilities that make life easier. The issue of developer knowledge is certainly important and you do not want to be unable to withstand a code review because your code is replete with someone-else’s. As Brian Kergihan once said: “Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.” Using code from people more clever than you are may well (and likely will) result in the inability to debug said code efficiently or effectively.
This leads me into my second point. Almost all code on the internet is licensed. Either explicitly or implicitly by copyright or similar. Certain licenses are very permissive as to what you can do with code, others much less so. The GNU GPL is famous for rendering any code it touches open source by default. Even one function could potentially render you obligated to release your codebase as open source software. Even Stackoverflow and the rest of Stack Exchange is licensed.
So by using other people’s code willy nilly, you run the risk of both technical and legal shibolleths, the likes of which you may not understand.
6
Licensing issues aside, I don’t think there’s a real answer to your question.
If you have a lot of time and think that writing some piece of code by yourself will be useful to you in the future, do it. Otherwise, don’t. Or maybe you can copy some piece of code but still take the time to understand it. That might be the best thing to do, or it might not be the best thing to do. It depends on the situation, and you can’t really tell for sure until it’s over.
It all comes down to making judgments. You can’t make the right judgments all the time, but you can avoid doing things dogmatically, without looking at the specific situation that you’re in… Although, overthinking can be another pitfall.
1
I always try to avoid copy-pasta from Internet, unless the code is exactly what’s needed, is an industry standard/best practice, and is free of any licensing issues.
The copy pasta code usually is:
- out of date
- bloated
- adds additional dependencies
- has unknown bugs
It’s better to understand the idea. Then write your own solution with code style that matches the project, doesn’t add extra dependencies, is simpler, more modern, and better known.
Also, sometimes ideas can be encumbered with patents, so you should be aware of that as well.