Sometimes the best course of action when trying out a new piece of technology or language is just to copy what someone else did. Not line for line of course, that would violate academic policy, also you need to know what your software is doing and copying outright wouldn’t be a good course of action. However, you can take a look at the overall structure and small techniques that other people have done when programming a similar project. You can learn a lot from code that you find out in the wild. Something that surprised me most about my transition from a student to a software engineer is how much you use the code base to write your code. When you are doing a project in school, it’s usually a stand alone project where you create something from scratch. In the ‘real world’ as a software engineer you are adding to a very complex codebase that has lots of things going on. So the first thing you do when you start coding is try to find similar examples of things that you are trying to do and implement those techniques in your solution. Since becoming a software engineer I find myself gravitating towards that line of thinking. A phrase often said in engineering is “Don’t re-invent the wheel”.