Overheard a senior dev scoff at a beginner's Python project

I was at a coffee shop near campus and heard a dev call someone's first CRUD app 'just copy paste garbage'. That stuck with me. Made me wonder how many beginners give up because of comments like that. Has anyone else run into people who gatekeep like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_wyatt21h ago

Honestly I used to think the same way that dev did. When I first learned Python I was pretty proud of my clunky login script, and I looked down on people who copied stuff from Stack Overflow without fully understanding it. But then I helped my cousin with his first CRUD app - he had copy pasted most of it and changed variable names around. Watching him go from "I don't get any of this" to explaining the whole thing back to me a week later was a huge wakeup call. That copying is literally how you start to figure out patterns and build confidence, and looking down on it just keeps people from getting to that next step.

kim_martin21h ago

Hear them out but push back a little - that first Python project is how you learn the basics, not a submission for a job. Everyone starts somewhere and that "copy paste garbage" is probably the same thing they wrote when they were learning. Don't let one grumpy dev in a coffee shop make you feel bad about building stuff, every line of code counts.