[err4nt]

STOP copying and pasting. Try typing every character in your CSS and never rely on external or pre-made libraries and you will learn what is, and more importantly what is not actually required for a layout to work.

In two years of adopting this policy in my own work I would say I learned as fact as the entire decade before that, where I was making quilts by stitching pre-made bits of fabric into one larger piece.

Don't be a quiltmaker any longer!

[WaltPurvis]

Did you personally think up this quilting analogy for copy-pasta programming? Because it's pretty awesome and I want to be able to give due credit when I steal it.

[err4nt]

I'm not sure what you mean. I was using things like HTML5 Boilerplate, Bootstrap, jQuery and a whole slew of plugins to build the things I wanted. Then I set a goal to type every character I delivered, and the only copy/paste I'm allowed to do are from my own snippets, which I have typed character-by-character. I got better at CSS this way, so I decided to do it with my HTML as well!

Three years ago I couldn't write a line of JavaScript (though I could hook up, configure, and enable jQuery plugins). So I decided to just start _typing_ 100% of the JavaScript I would add to my projects instead of copying and pasting it in…two years later I'm writing vanilla JavaScript for everything I need and I haven't put jQuery on a project in months!

If you want to get closer to a language (CSS, HTML, JS) stop copying from Stack Overflow, stop using libraries you don't understand, and either write it yourself or re-write your own version of somebody else's pattern and use that.

This idea didn't come from another developer or advice or anything, I just set a personal goal to see how it would turn out. Now I highly recommend it to others too!