For as long as I’ve been writing on this site, I’ve used a combination of syntax highlighting, GitHub gists, or code or pre tags to help share code relevant to a given post.

But the more technical articles I read and the more that I see we, as an entire industry, start to rely versus utilize tools of Stack Overflow and other sites, the more I wonder how much we really understand what we’re writing (or even care) so long as the end results just works.

This isn’t a commentary on how quickly we should ship something. Instead, it’s about how we solve a given problem while also truly learning what it is that we’re incorporating into our codebase.

Code With Images

There are ways in which we can share code but that prevent us from copying and pasting it into our editors. So, at the very least, I’m going to start experimenting with using CodeImg as a way to share things from this point forward.

This way, I can share code – and comments – along with commentary with what I’m doing that also require the code be typed into an IDE rather than copy and pasted. Honestly, it’s probably not a popular move, but it’s something I’m willing to try.

And here’s why: It’s not that I think sites that help developers solve problems are bad (on the contrary, they are fantastic), but I don’t want to look back in one year save five years, and not have a deeper understanding of how I solve problems.

Sure, it may require reading the code, manually typing it, looking at references in a language’s manual, and yes it’s always possible to copy and paste code from somewhere else.

But if I want to help anyone learn even the newest or smallest of ideas and I can do so in a way that still looks good and pushes just a slight bit of learning, I assume I can start with my code on my site.

And maybe it’ll help someone else grok an idea more, too.