That bit about professional bakers saying it takes 100 loaves is so real. Its like the first 50 are just you fighting with the dough and the next 50 are you finally getting along with it. The bad loaves do teach you more though, I still think about my first few flat bricks way more than any perfect one.

Started digging through my old code from a similar time and found a script I wrote to rename photos from my phone. It was literally 200 lines of if-elif chains checking file extensions like .jpg and .png one by one instead of using a simple os.path.splitext() call. I even had a separate function for each file type that did the exact same renaming logic just copied and pasted. My roommate at the time asked why I didn't just loop through the folder and I got defensive about my "elegant solution." Now looking back I see the cringe but also remember how excited I was when that thing actually worked and didn't crash.