Show Me Your First Ugly Project. I'll Go First (It's Embarrassing).

What did your very first project look like? Not the polished one. The crime scene.

I'll go first, and I am not going to clean it up for you: mine was a Tkinter calculator in colours that should be illegal in 3 countries.

This is a short post with one purpose. I show you mine, honestly, and then you show me yours.

Behold: the calculator

The background was a green I can only describe as "hospital wall." The buttons were orange. The numbers were huge, the equals button was the same size as every other button, and the layout had a gap in one corner that I never figured out, so I just left it there like a missing tooth.

Click any number, then an operator, then another number, then equals, and it worked. Slowly. Suspiciously. But it worked.

Press divide, then zero, then equals, and it crashed the entire window. Gone. No error message a human could read, just the program giving up on existence. I knew about the bug for weeks and my solution was to simply never press that combination, which is a strategy I have since seen in professional software too 😄

The specs, for the record

Built in one sitting, start to finish, fuelled by tea and the specific confidence of a man who had watched 6 hours of Tkinter tutorials and retained the colour chapter best of all.

The window wasn't resizable, because I didn't know how, so the calculator simply existed at one size, take it or leave it. The clear button only cleared some things, depending on its mood, which I now know was a variable not being reset, but at the time I described as the calculator "remembering." I showed it to a friend in the hall, who pressed divide, then zero, then equals, in that order, within his first ten seconds of touching it. Ten seconds. I had avoided that combination for weeks by instinct, and he walked straight into it like he'd been given a map.

He laughed. Then he asked if I could make him one for splitting mess bills, which is how the next project started, so the ugly calculator is also, technically, the reason anything in my life has ever been commissioned.

Why I loved it anyway

That calculator is where programming stopped being something I watched and started being something I did.

I learned what a function was because the equals button needed one. I learned what an error was because of the divide-by-zero explosion. I learned that making a button stay where you put it is a genuine engineering discipline and I have deep respect for it now.

None of that arrived from a tutorial. It arrived from a green-and-orange monster that I built badly, with my own hands, in one sitting I still remember clearly.

The honest bit

I almost didn't post this, because the calculator is genuinely embarrassing and because everyone online seems to have started with a machine learning project and a startup idea.

But I think the ugly first projects are the honest ones. Nobody's first program was beautiful. Some people just cropped theirs out of the story.

Mine had a colour scheme like a traffic accident and a fatal bug I avoided by superstition. It also made me a programmer, in the small true sense: I had built a thing, and it ran, and when it broke I understood a little more of why.