You're right about that extra cut really hurting small places. I used to order through apps without thinking, but seeing a $12 burrito jump to $16 before fees changed my mind. Now I check the menu online and call it in, just like @lunaw72 said. It feels better knowing the restaurant keeps all the money, and half the time it's ready faster. The apps are just too greedy.

My early Python win was just managing to print "hello world" without breaking everything. @norar65 is right about momentum, but mine was more like a slow crawl. At least the wall I hit was made of soft syntax errors.

That's just making excuses for being unprepared.