Pro tip: version control seemed like overkill until week 3 ruined me

I started learning python back in march and thought git was for people working in big teams, not for my 50 line scripts. Then I spent 3 hours debugging a file I accidentally edited twice and lost my original logic. Restoring from a backup folder in Dropbox was a mess, so I finally watched a youtube tutorial from Corey Schafer and now I commit after every tiny win. Has anyone else ignored the basics for way too long and paid for it later?

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johnb9511d agoMost Upvoted

Corey Schafer’s good, but I gotta push back a little. I’ve been doing this for years without touching git beyond a few basic commits, and my side projects have survived fine. Week 3 sounds like a pain, but I think the real fix is just naming your files better or making a copy before you edit. I had a script that I kept rewriting and losing, so I just started saving a new version with a date in the filename like data_oct14.py. It’s ugly but it works, and it forced me to actually think about what changed each time. Git feels like a whole extra layer of ceremony when you’re solo, and sometimes it slows me down more than it helps.