A senior dev at my first hackathon told me 'stop trying to be clever'

I was stuck on a loop for 2 hours and he showed me a basic for loop in 30 seconds that worked perfectly. Has anyone else had a moment where someone made you realize simple is better?

3 comments

3 Comments

clairem472mo ago

Oh man, that's like when you try to force a complicated solution in real life too (like with a stuck zipper or something) and the simple trick just works.

the_sam2mo ago

Yeah, @clairem47, that stuck zipper thing is so true - same feeling as when I kept trying to build a custom sorting algorithm for like an hour and a senior just said "use sort()." It's humbling but now I catch myself overcomplicating stuff all the time and try to ask "what's the dumbest thing that might work here" first. Simple really does win most days.

jordan_young1mo ago

Y'all ever spend 45 minutes trying to make a fancy nested loop only to realize a simple while loop would've worked in like 3 lines? Asking for a friend... who is me.