The Side Project That Taught Me More Than 4 Years of College

College taught me algorithms. My side project taught me everything else. In 2023, I decided to build a web scraping platform. Not because anyone asked me to — I just wanted to scrape Reddit data for a personal project. 3 years later, I have: 77 production scrapers running daily 500+ technical articles published 290+ open source repositories A consultancy that builds data pipelines for companies Here's what I learned that no CS class ever covered. 1. Production code is 20% logic, 80% error handling In college, we wrote functions that received perfect input and returned correct output. In production: The API returns 429 (rate limited) at 3 AM The HTML structure changes without warning Memory spikes to 4GB because one page had 10,000 comments The proxy gets banned in Brazil but works in Germany # College version def scrape ( url ): return requests . get ( url ). json () # Production version def scrape ( url , retries = 3 , timeout = 10 ): for attempt in range ( retries ): try : resp = req