Hot take: a guy at the library told me to stop using tutorials and I finally get why | Coding For Beginners - Freelance Forum - The Community for Independent Professionals
Hot take: a guy at the library told me to stop using tutorials and I finally get why
I was at the downtown library in Boise two Saturdays ago, working through a Python tutorial on one of their public computers, when the guy next to me asked what I was building. I said nothing yet, just following along. He laughed and said he had done 14 months of tutorials before he wrote his first real program, and the whole time he was just copying. That hit me harder than it should have, because I have been doing the same thing since January. Every time a lesson ended I would start a new one instead of trying to make something of my own. He told me to close the tab and write a dumb little program that sorts my fishing lures by weight, no matter how bad it looked. I did it that night in about 40 minutes, looked up 6 things I did not know, and learned more than I had in the last 3 lessons combined. Now I am stuck on how to save the list so it is still there when I reopen the file, so if anyone has a simple way to do that without a database I would love to hear it.