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Chatting with my neighbor, a retired teacher, made me realize I was overcomplicating my first Python script.
I was stuck for two days trying to build a program that could sort my movie list and pull in ratings... I kept adding more features and it got messy. He said he used to tell his students, 'Make the simple version work before you add the fancy stuff.' So I scrapped my code and just wrote something that sorts a list of five titles. It worked in an hour. Now I get why starting small matters. How do you guys stop yourselves from adding too much at once when you're learning?
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the_terry6mo ago
Your neighbor is totally right. I built a web scraper once and got lost trying to make it perfect. Had to delete everything and just make it fetch one page of text, like @averymartin was getting at. Seeing that one dumb line print to the console was the win. Now I literally write "dumb version" as a comment at the top of my file to remind myself.
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sarah_hart6mo ago
Two days stuck on a movie list script?" That's brutal, but classic. Your neighbor's advice is the only thing that works for me, just force yourself to do the dumb version first. The fancy stuff can wait until the simple thing actually runs.
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