I used to think you had to get everything perfect on the first try when learning to code.

I was working on a simple weather app project last Tuesday night. I was trying to make an API call to get the temperature for my city, Portland, but I kept getting an error. For two hours, I just stared at my screen, trying to find the one perfect line of code that would fix it. I was getting nowhere. Finally, I just started over. I deleted the whole function and typed it out again, slowly, checking each step. It worked. The mistake was a tiny typo in the variable name I'd copied. That moment made me realize that coding isn't about being perfect. It's about trying, breaking, and fixing. How do you all deal with getting stuck on a small bug?

3 comments

3 Comments

avery_smith2221d ago

But is a two hour typo really that deep of a life lesson though.

gracewebb21d ago

Lol avery_smith22 it's only a deep life lesson if you're the one who wasted the two hours. For everyone else it's just a funny story about being bad at proofreading. The lesson is literally just to double check your work before hitting send, which we all already know and ignore. So yeah, maybe not that deep, but still a solid reminder to slow down.

lane.cameron10d ago

My buddy was trying to set up a new router for like three hours last weekend. He was about to return it as broken, swearing the instructions were wrong. Turns out he never plugged the power cable into the wall, just into the router itself. We've all been there, staring at a problem so hard we miss the obvious fix. Sometimes you just gotta walk away for a minute or start from scratch.