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I wrote my 100th line of code last Tuesday and honestly it felt like nothing | Coding For Beginners - Librear

I wrote my 100th line of code last Tuesday and honestly it felt like nothing

Everyone talks about big moments in learning to code, like your first app or your first bug fix. I hit what sounded like a milestone on paper, 100 lines in my little Python file, and I sat there waiting to feel different. The thing is, those 100 lines were mostly print statements and a loop that counted to ten, plus about 15 lines that were just comments I wrote to myself like "this part confuses me." I counted them anyway because I needed something to feel good about after a week of getting errors I did not understand. What actually changed my mood was not the number, it was scrolling up and seeing that line 40 had a mistake I caught on my own before running the file. That tiny catch mattered more than any round number, because it meant I was starting to notice patterns instead of just copying whatever a tutorial did. So my hot take for new folks is to stop chasing milestones like 100 lines or finishing a course and start tracking how often you spot your own mistakes. Has anyone else had a small self caught error mean more to you than some milestone you were aiming for?

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1 Comment

jenkins.alice19d ago

Oh great, so we're handing out trophies for 100 lines of print statements now? I'm just messing with you, but the 100 line thing being a milestone is funny to me because half my early files were comments yelling at myself. Here's the thing though, your hot take is actually right and it's the part most new people skip. Catching your own mistake before running the file means your brain built a little model of what the code should do, and that model is the whole skill. The round numbers are fake progress, they just feel good because they're easy to count. I still remember the first time I spotted a missing colon or a typo'd variable on my own, and yeah it hit harder than any course I finished. Track your catches, not your lines, because lines pile up whether you learn anything or not.