c/coding-for-beginners

Hot take: learn to read stack traces before you touch any tutorial

I spent my first 6 months of coding just copying stuff from YouTube videos. Every time something broke I had zero idea why. Then one night I got a NullPointerException in Java and instead of googling the error I forced myself to read the whole trace line by line. Took me 45 minutes to figure out it was a simple typo in a variable name. After that I stopped watching tutorials almost completely. Now I break my own code on purpose just to read the errors. It sounds dumb but it's like learning to read a map vs memorizing routes. Anyone else find that error messages teach you more than any course ever did?

1 comments

reesel50•3d ago

That moment my first Python script deleted my own folder

I was practicing on my laptop in a coffee shop in Portland, trying to write a cleanup script that would remove old temp files. I had the paths mixed up and instead of pointing to a temp folder, I pointed it straight at my project folder where I kept all my practice exercises. Hit enter, watched the terminal spit out line after line of deleted files, and it took me maybe 10 seconds to realize what happened. I froze and just stared at the screen, then yanked the power cord since I didn't know how to stop the loop. I lost about 3 weeks of notes and small scripts, but thankfully my big projects were on GitHub. I keep a backup on a USB drive now, and I triple check every path before running anything. Has anyone else nuked something important and found a quick way to recover it before, or was I just extra unlucky?

1 comments

patricialee•4d ago

Picked Python over JavaScript for my first real project and actually don't regret it

Everyone told me I had to learn JavaScript first because "that's what the web runs on" but I went with Python instead for a data scraping thing last month and it took me like 3 days to get working instead of weeks. Has anyone else started with the "wrong" language and had it work out better for them?

c/coding-for-beginners

Hot take: learn to read stack traces before you touch any tutorial

That moment my first Python script deleted my own folder

Picked Python over JavaScript for my first real project and actually don't regret it

Found a game changer for debugging my Python loops

Spent a whole weekend trying to fix a CSS flexbox issue that turned out to be a missing closing div tag.

Rant: Everyone keeps skipping the step where you actually test your code snippet before using it

Switched from notepad to VS Code for my first project after 3 crashes

Appreciation post: That 3-day YouTube course that clicked after I failed a personal project

Spent 45 minutes debugging a missing semicolon and realized I had been staring at the wrong line the whole time

Caught a bug in my first python script that cost me 3 days of work

The one YouTube shortcut that actually fixed my broken loop

Question about that coding bootcamp grad who told me I was learning wrong

I used to think learning JavaScript was a waste of time for a beginner.

Warning: I spent 6 hours debugging a missing semicolon in JavaScript

Chat with a bootcamp grad last week made me question my whole learning path

Update: I used to hate using Git but now I get it

The one Python trick that tripped me up for 3 days straight

TIL why my CSS grid kept breaking after 4 hours of debugging

The customer who watched me debug for 45 minutes then asked one question that fixed it

Finally got my first Python script to run without errors

Tried freeCodeCamp vs Codecademy for a month each and the difference was huge

The big debate: learning Python vs JavaScript first as a total beginner

Tried to build a simple calculator app and my terminal turned into a ghost town

My neighbor convinced me to start with Python instead of JavaScript

I was terrified of Git merge conflicts for 6 months