[morbidhawk]

Your advice here probably applies more to beginner programmers where the goal is to prevent them from just copying/pasting code and following bad practices. It's a good thing for them to learn to write things from scratch. I've been programming for a while and I've felt for a long time like my skills kind of plateaued. Writing things from scratch and reading a lot about design principles haven't really helped me improve at all. But lately I've started to read code, really read it to understand what it does and this has vastly improved my skills.

> There is a finite amount you can learn by reading other people's code. You might find specific idioms you admire and adopt, but you will not - and probably should not - try to conform to other developers' methods

From my own experience I disagree with this since reading other people's code has helped me improve a lot. I've noticed that I am so much more creative and intuitive about good software design when I go to write code now and I believe it is credit to reading code everyday