c/coding-for-beginners

PSA: Someone told me I was overthinking variables and it kind of stuck with me

I was at this little coding meetup in Austin about 3 months ago, just a small group in a library basement. This older guy named Dave looked over my shoulder at a beginner project I was showing off and said 'why do you have 12 variables for something that needs 3?' He wasn't being mean, just blunt. It hit me because I was so focused on making my code 'readable' that I actually made it messy. He showed me how to combine a bunch of them into a single object and it cleaned up like 40 lines. I keep going back and forth on whether he was right or if sometimes more variables make it easier for total beginners to follow. Has anyone else had a stranger just drop a truth bomb on your code like that?

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roberts.diana•15h ago

I was writing loops all wrong for 6 months

Started learning Python back in January and I kept getting these weird bugs where my for loops would skip the last item in a list. I figured it was just a quirk of the language. Then last week I was helping a buddy debug his code and he pointed out I was modifying the list while iterating over it. I had no idea that was a no-go. Turns out Python keeps track of the index position, so when you remove an item, everything shifts and stuff gets skipped. Felt like an idiot for not catching it sooner. Anyone else have a basic concept suddenly click after months of doing it wrong?

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kai779•1d ago

Tired of seeing beginners copy-paste Stack Overflow code without understanding it

I was helping a guy in my local coding meetup last Tuesday who copied a whole function from Stack Overflow to fix his login form, but when I asked him what each line did he just stared at me. He spent 3 hours debugging later because he didn't realize the code was for a different framework entirely. How do you guys force yourself to actually read and understand code before using it?

c/coding-for-beginners

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