[rrouse]

What I don't know is whether or not the person in that email is equipped with what he or she needs to actually be able to figure out how to incorporate Stripe.

Are you at all confident that you have taught people how to research and understand what they are looking at?

I've known plenty of people who can follow patterns and regurgitate what they have seen, but have little to no ability to actually create. If what they want to do deviates just a little, they are toast.

[skndr]

People aren't stuck just copying.

At first, it might be copying. But having something workable that you can tweak can give you a good idea of how something works. After enough time tweaking, you can start building new things based on those best practices/examples.

[mattangriffel]

Yeah, so we definitely teach how to find gems, read through documentation and troubleshoot errors. There's a little bit of API knowledge that may be lacking (which we're definitely working on as a module - we've gotten a lot of requests).

Students who have taken the class have definitely figured out way more complicated stuff afterwards using some of the techniques we teach. Whether this person in particular will be able to figure out how to incorporate Stripe, I'm not sure.