My first real coding project crashed my whole computer 3 times in one afternoon

Last Tuesday I was working on a simple Python script to organize my music files and it kept freezing my laptop. I had 47 songs in a folder and just wanted to sort them by artist, but I accidentally wrote an infinite loop that ate up all my RAM. Third time it happened I actually threw my hands up and went for a walk. Has anyone else had a beginner project go totally sideways like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

miles5811mo ago

And then you come back from the walk and the first thing you see is your frozen terminal staring at you like "yeah what now." I did almost the same thing with a while True loop that just kept printing "hello" over and over until my fan sounded like a jet engine. The walk is honestly the smartest move though, half the time I come back and spot the bug in like two minutes.

casey8431mo ago

Come on man, I gotta disagree with the walk thing. Ive lost more bugs walking away than Ive ever solved that way. You come back fresh but now youre in a different headspace and you miss the small details you were tracking before. I spent two hours chasing a mismatched bracket once cause I took a "break" and came back thinking the whole logic was wrong when it was just a missing curly brace. Sometimes you just sit there and brute force read every line until your eyes bleed. Thats the real debug move.