My cousin the "coding genius" told me to just copy and paste from Stack Overflow

So my cousin Brad, who took one Python class in 2019, told me I didn't need to actually understand loops because I could just copy code from Stack Overflow and tweak it. I spent 14 hours last Friday debugging a script that turned out to be two missing colons and an indentation error from a 2012 forum post. Has anyone else had a family member give them terrible coding advice that set them back a whole weekend?

2 comments

2 Comments

paul_thompson6727d ago

Did you at least buy Brad a beer for that nugget of wisdom? I once spent three days on an off-by-one error from a 2014 snippet, so I feel your pain.

sarah19827d ago

Figured out the real problem was Brad's beer was on my tab the whole time. @paul_thompson67, off by one errors are brutal, especially when you're debugging someone else's old code.