I changed my mind about learning Python after one reddit reply

I was stuck on a beginner Python tutorial for 2 weeks and kept quitting. Then a guy in a discord channel told me to "just build something dumb like a calculator that insults you." He said stop trying to understand everything and just copy code that works. That small advice got me to finish my first real script in 3 hours. Has anyone else found a weird project that finally made coding click for them?

3 comments

3 Comments

evan_jenkins2mo ago

Hold on, you were stuck for two whole weeks on a beginner Python tutorial? That sounds way more dramatic than it needed to be. I mean, it's good advice to just jump in and build something stupid, but I feel like you're giving way too much credit to a random Discord comment.

evan_jenkins2mo ago

Used to be all about grinding through proper courses and documentation, thought that was the only real way to learn. But then I spent months bouncing between tutorials and never actually building anything, just copying code without understanding it. That random comment about making a stupid little calculator program totally flipped my approach, got me writing actual code from scratch within an hour. Looking back, the whole "just build something broken" method is way more valuable than following along with some polished tutorial for two weeks. Sometimes the dumbest advice turns out to be the most useful, even if it sounds ridiculous at first.

benreed23d ago

@evan_jenkins I get what you're saying but I think you're missing the bigger point. The real breakthrough wasn't just the calculator thing, it was finally accepting that you don't need to know how your code works to get it running. I spent a full day building a script that fetched random cat facts from an API, didn't understand half of it but it worked and that feeling of hitting run and seeing that output is what keeps you coming back. Sometimes the dumbest projects teach you the most because they force you to stumble through the hard parts.