My first real project crashed and I learned more in a day than a month of tutorials

I spent three weeks building a simple weather app using Python and a free API. Everything worked fine until Tuesday, when I tried to add a feature to save past searches. My code broke completely, showing a 'KeyError' I didn't understand. I spent over six hours reading error logs and checking a forum, which felt awful. Finally, I realized I was trying to access data from the API before it had fully loaded. That one mistake taught me about asynchronous calls and debugging. Has anyone else had a project fall apart and learned something big from it?

3 comments

3 Comments

uma_taylor4718d ago

Oh man, that feeling is the worst. I had a similar thing happen when I was trying to make a script to rename a bunch of files. It kept crashing because I didn't check if a file already existed with the new name. Spent a whole afternoon staring at it before I figured it out. That kind of deep dive to fix one error really does stick with you way more than any tutorial.

murphy.abby18d ago

Ugh, I used to hate those long debugging sessions. But you're right, that's how you actually learn the stuff that sticks. Changed my whole view on fixing errors.

the_christopher18d ago

Right? @murphy.abby, those sessions are brutal but they're the only way my brain actually learns anything. It's like getting hit with a clue-by-four.