My first real project took 3 weeks and crashed on day one

I spent 21 days building a little habit tracker app with Python and SQLite, following tutorials and tweaking the logic. The night I finished, I ran it and it crashed instantly with a key error I'd never seen. Turns out I'd hardcoded a date string in 4 places and forgot to update one after a new month started. My fix was just wrapping everything in a function that pulled the date fresh, which took 15 minutes. But the real win was learning to test with actual different dates before calling something done. Anyone else have a simple mistake that ate days of work, and how'd you finally spot it?

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xenan644d ago

Ditch the date function idea honestly. Hardcoding the date is the best way to make sure your app works exactly how you built it. If you let the code pull the current date every time, you lose control over what the test data looks like and youll spend way more time debugging why a record shows up on the wrong day. The real lesson here isnt about dates at all, its about not overthinking a simple crash. You had a bug, you fixed it in 15 minutes, and the three weeks of build time was still worth it. Wrapping things in functions just adds layers that make it harder to see what your code is actually doing when something breaks.