I fell into the trap of thinking that writing 100byte assembly programs was "real programming. I used to make small demos. They'd take about a day each to make

I fell into the trap of thinking that writing 100byte assembly programs was "real programming. I used to make small demos. They'd take about a day each to make my Atari 800 do something amazing. I was assigned to create 14 interactive screens for a game at work. I thought to myself "14 screens. I make a screen in 1 day so 14 days I'll be done". Turned out to be closer to 90 days. Of course maybe I just suck as a programmer but my takeaway was real programing is more work than "drawing something interesting on the screen".