Chatting with my neighbor, a retired teacher, made me realize I was overcomplicating my first Python script.

Patricia Hayes · 2026-03-28T11:05:04.720948+00:00

She said 'just get it to work, then make it pretty' after I spent 3 days trying to write perfect code for a simple number-guessing game, which finally got me to stop overthinking and just run the thing.

jake6386mo ago

Bad advice honestly. That messy first draft just becomes technical debt you have to fix later. Spent a whole month untangling a coworker's "just get it working" script that was impossible to update. Clean code from the start saves huge headaches.

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the_wren6mo ago

The messy draft gets you unstuck, then you clean it up.

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hayden1446mo ago

Jake638 has a point but sometimes you just need to see it run.

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