Hit 1000 lines of code in my first project and felt nothing

I spent three weekends building a simple to-do list app in Python and when I finally crossed 1000 lines, I expected some big moment of pride. Instead, I realized half of it was copy-paste and bad logic that I had to rewrite later. Did anyone else hit a milestone like this and find out it didn't mean what you thought?

2 comments

2 Comments

robinson.paul21d ago

Had the exact same thing happen with my first Flask project. Hit 800 lines and realized I had written this huge function that was basically a mess of if-else statements checking for every possible user input case. I scrapped 400 lines and replaced it with a simple dictionary lookup and a loop. Felt way better after that because the code actually made sense and was half the size. Sometimes the real milestone is figuring out what to delete, not what to add.

the_morgan21d ago

Yeah, "simple dictionary lookup and a loop" really is the unsung hero of refactoring, isn't it @robinson.paul? Though I'd argue that feeling of clarity comes more from deleting the junk code than any actual cleverness in the replacement.