My first Python script crashed my entire laptop during finals week

I was in the campus library at 2 AM trying to get a simple web scraper to work for a project due the next day. Accidentally wrote an infinite loop that ate up all my RAM and froze my screen solid. Had to hold the power button down for 10 seconds to force a restart, lost 3 hours of unsaved code. Turns out I forgot to add a break condition to the while loop, dumbest mistake ever. Recovered by re-typing everything from scratch and testing each line in the Python shell first. Has anyone else had a simple bug spiral into a total system crash like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

morgan.jason7d agoMost Upvoted

Man I've been there... forgot a semicolon in a bash script once and it just nuked my terminal, had to restart everything. Testing each line in the shell first saved me too, that's the only way I got through my first few projects without more crashes.

corah757d ago

My last job had us using this clunky CRM that would crash if we typed too fast in the customer notes field. Found out after three weeks that hitting enter at the end of a sentence instead of letting it auto-save was what caused all the freezes. Its wild how one tiny thing like a wrong key press in bash or a bad workflow in some random app can mess up your whole day. I started testing each step in that CRM just like you test bash lines, one click at a time, before doing anything big. Its basically the same problem everywhere you look, just different tools and different mistakes.