My friend Carla tried to follow a Python tutorial for weeks and barely remembered a thing. She finally gave up and wrote a script to rename and sort her thousands of family photos. She figured out loops and file paths by searching for each problem as it popped up, which was frustrating but made sense because she needed it. That one messy project got her further than all those boring practice exercises. She says she only really learns when she's fixing something that actually matters to her.

How often do radios actually fail that badly though, @baker.thomas? Most of the time a little static isn't a big deal. Calling it a "mess" seems like overkill for a minor hiccup.