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Summary
Pick one or two languages and build something instead of tool hopping. Lean on what already exists rather than reinventing the wheel. Maldonado swapped a from-scratch Python SSH module for Paramiko after a colleague pointed it out, and Python earns its place as a starting language because it reads cleanly months later and talks to almost anything. The conversation moves through learning from API documentation, the build-test-optimize cycle, testing across every platform your code will touch, and using Git so a bad change can roll back. It ends on the bus test: documentation good enough that someone else could keep the project running if its author vanished.
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