Tommy, I saw the domain name of this post and went to the main site. My suspicion was correct, you're from Richmond. I am too and went to Virginia. Awesome to see a Richmonder on the front-page of HN!
I agree with this a lot. Just the act of typing it out is better (even if just marginally) than straight up copying and pasting especially early on in your career. There are some pretty complex tutorials for Java EE that rely on copy/paste and even with the context it's hard to absorb a lot of it.