I finally had a coding mentor tell me I was wasting my time with Python frameworks

Met this older guy at a coffee shop in Tulsa last month who's been coding since the 80s. He watched me grinding through Django tutorials and just flat out said "you're learning the wrong stuff, learn how the damn computer works first." Told me to drop frameworks, drop libraries, and just write raw Python for 6 months. Been doing it for 3 weeks now and honestly I finally understand what's actually happening when I run a script. Has anyone else had someone tell them to ditch the fancy tools and go back to basics?

2 comments

2 Comments

jesse_thomas275h ago

What did he say about learning memory management specifically?

lucas6327m ago

Man that's exactly what I was thinking too! When I first started learning C, memory management was the thing that finally made everything click for me. I spent like a week just messing around with malloc and free, crashing my programs left and right until I figured out how to track allocations properly. The big moment for me was when I wrote a simple linked list from scratch and had to manually free every node. That hands on practice was way more useful than reading about it.