My first real coding project crashed so hard last night I almost quit

I spent the whole weekend building this little Python script to organize my recipe collection, you know, sort them by ingredient and cook time. I was so proud when it finally ran without errors on Sunday night. Then last night I tried to add a CSV file with like 200 recipes and the whole thing just froze up and dumped a memory error. Turns out I was loading every single recipe into a list instead of processing them one at a time, which is apparently a rookie mistake. My boyfriend just laughed and said 'welcome to programming' which honestly made me more mad than the bug itself. Has anyone else hit that wall where a tiny oversight makes your whole project useless? I need to hear I'm not alone on this.

3 comments

3 Comments

umar5928d ago

Wait, were you storing all 200 recipes as separate objects in that list? That kind of memory grab is a classic trap where Python just eats up your RAM if you don't chunk the data. How did you finally figure out the fix, by checking memory usage or just guessing it was the list?

wesley38528d ago

Did you actually watch your memory usage spike when you loaded them all? I've been there with a scraping project where I was storing every scraped page as a dict in a list and my machine just froze up. The fix is to use a generator or just read and process each recipe one at a time, write it to a file or database as you go. I figured it out by running `top` in terminal and seeing Python using 4GB of RAM for like 500 items which was absurd. Now I always batch process or stream data instead of keeping it all in memory unless I really need random access to every item at once.

james_campbell1228d ago

Laugh it off now but I felt that memory error in my bones. @umar59 is right about the classic trap - I once crashed my whole laptop with a similar CSV loading mistake, felt like a genius for about five seconds. My girlfriend said the same thing your boyfriend did and I told her if she laughed one more time I'd make her organize all 200 recipes by hand. The fix was actually simple once I stopped panicking and googled it, just reading the file line by line instead of shoving everything into a list. You'll be fine, we all did this at least once, probably twice.