This would sound like questionable advice except that the best code I wrote in college resulted from an accident…

I’d sat down all night and written some C for a graphics class. Everything was great, yay, victory. Proceeded to tar it up per class guidelines and did something like this:

tar cvf assignment.c assignment.h data.txt readme whatever.cuz

And as many of you no doubt recognize, I’d forgotten to supply a destination name before listing the source files.

So the code was gone. My brain was gone, too, so I explained what happened and sent what I had, including a working executable, to the TA. He gave me an extra day to finish.

So the next day I sat down and wrote it all again and as mentioned above, it was some of the best code I’d written. Doing it again from the top saved all sorts of dead ends and mistaken approaches.