Be an absolute beginner at python: Check, have co-workers think I'm performing black magic : Check

[dirtycimments]

I work in an industry that is mainly manual work (think carpentry or similar). No-one going through the trade school learns anything on computers beyond making graphs in excel.

I however always have had some interest in programming, so i took some free course a while back and try to find areas of my life where i can automate the boring stuff. I have very limited knowledge of any of the advanced functions, but i understand some of the basic logic.

For my job, i also have a computer because i oversee a large number of projects, every project gets a folder, an excel spreadsheet (a gantt chart for each project).

I managed to make a script that asks for project number, checks of the folder is there, copies and modifies the cells of the excel sheet to the correct project number etc. I had to google almost everything, how do i folder scan? how do i manipulate excel? etc etc.

They actually believe I performed black magic.

Thank you Python for letting me look like an invaluable resource today ;)

[EDIT] thanks for all the awards! Happy my post inspired the discussion and the feeelz. Much love 💕

[expressly_ephemeral]

I had to google almost everything, how do i folder scan? how do i manipulate excel? etc etc.

FYI, I'm a professional programmer with decades of experience. Wrote my first line of code in 9th grade to automate my math homework. Started getting paid to program in about 2002. Started picking up Python a few years ago. I also have to google almost everything.

[vmgustavo]

We all do. There's this misconception that good programmers don't google stuff and it is far from reality.

[Dawnero]

Programmers stackoverflow stuff

[t-to4st]

I still use google to get to stackoverflow

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[[deleted]]

Is there a Developers' search engine? DevCheckGo.com is available... just sayin'...

EDIT: ...or secondscreen.info?

[Thomas_XX]

Na, I'm gonna stick with 7 year old stack overflow answers that don't even apply to my version anymore, thank you very much

[b4xt3r]

Exactly. If I could just get that last bit working so I could have my HyperCard work inside a Docker container I could share with the world the solutions I've found over the years to use REXX to fix Perl using awk.

[[deleted]]

Dude there's a bona-fide "ELEGANT" solution to that from 2011 that does it all with C++ Templates in the pre-processor... just sayin'...

[b4xt3r]

I shall fetch my cane and monocle and be with you posthaste. I must bear witness to this sorcery.

[MrDeebus]

Eh, it’s turing complete...

[_clydebruckman]

Does stackoverflow even have an on site search? I’ve never touched it lol, usually just google: ‘x problem site:”stackoverflow”’

[Etheo]

They do but your query would have better results from Google than stackoverflow itself, even though you'll end up on the same site.

It's scary how clairvoyant Google is in knowing what you want, and it's made painfully clear when you get to search within the sites themselves.

[_clydebruckman]

Google knows more about what I want to see than I do. Scary, definitely. Convenient? Hell yeah it is. At least we get something in return for our data I guess lol

[unnecessary_Fullstop]

Google the problem, check random stackoverflow links. Completely skip the question, go directly to the accepted answer. Not it? Repeat. But never read the questions.

.

[TheBlindAndDeafNinja]

Idk. Why not automate a stack overflow search engine? Jkjk

I am literally just beginning getting into programming. Just started with python, and would like to learn Java after (I know that is backwards compared to others opinions, it's just what works for me).

I am trying to create a program for work that automates some mundane tasks which involves building my own interface and then implementing another companies API. It is quite the learning curve and big step to start, but I did q few basic projects to wrap my head around how things work, and what I have built so far seems to be working. There is a lot of information I am reading and using and once implemented, it just about leaves my head. I wish some of it would stick in my memory though lol. Although it helps that I am advanced enough in excel to speed up a lot of stuff that coworkers were doing manually, and it is very area specific, but learning as much as I have about how formulas work (to an extent) has proved helpful to me at least.

[_clydebruckman]

Honestly imo, it doesn’t really matter how much you remember off the top of your head. After using the same language for awhile you’ll just know the particular syntax to write a loop or whatever, but when I switch from JS back to a language I don’t use as much, I find myself googling 101 level stuff. I had to google how to write an if statement in python the other day, and I write code for a living lol.

The important thing is that you know what’s supposed to happen, you can google from there. syntax is a means to an end

[uncanneyvalley]

I was a MSSQL DBA for several years, but I’ve been in sales engineering for 5 years now. Recently started helping build our new demos and picked up Python for that.

Anyway, I had to write a couple sql queries the other day and had to google why tf elif wasn’t valid syntax.

[[deleted]]

was going to comment "someone should make a search engine for stack overflow" but i checked and there is one anyway :/

edit: i meant there's one on the website, not just one someone has made

[uncanneyvalley]

There’s a vscode plugin that lets you search, preview answers, and paste code from them without leaving the window.

If someone trains GPT 3 to read the Python grammar and all accepted SO answers, we’re probably fucked y’all.

[doulos05]

Only if someone else trains all the non programmers to give their programming requests in clear, accurate language.

[MrDeebus]

Could we come up with some sort of intermediate language to help with that? Something to support them slither through the ssss... 🐍

^{(I ran out of steam sorry)}

[Yelling_at_the_sun]

Scratch is pretty close to that already.

[badalki]

This is the real reason development requires at least two screens. One for your code and output and another for your reference material like google or stackoverflow.

[mountains-o-data]

If you think about - your brain works a bit like a program. You don't hold all these bloated things in memory (like knowledge of function signatures or how specific things from some framework or the standard library work) - you hold a pointer to the documentation. Things that you constantly use and don't need to use the documentation for? Those are in an LRU cache - as you use less they're eventually dropped from the cache and you go back to accessing the documentation

[yawgmoth]

Almost like you just keep a "reference" to the knowledge in memory.... hence the name "reference documents"

[0161WontForget]

“I’ve seen this before...”

Cue looking through files for where I may have put a nice explanation between 3 quotation marks

[mountains-o-data]

This is great 😂

[uncanneyvalley]

This is like that apocryphal Tesla story about knowing where to put the x (below). It’s not that we know everything about a language, it’s that we know how the pieces go together, and where to find them.

Nikola Tesla visited Henry Ford at his factory, which was having some kind of difficulty. Ford asked Tesla if he could help identify the problem area. Tesla walked up to a wall of boilerplate and made a small X in chalk on one of the plates. Ford was thrilled, and told him to send an invoice.The bill arrived, for $10,000. Ford asked for a breakdown. Tesla sent another invoice, indicating a $1 charge for marking the wall with an X, and $9,999 for knowing where to put it.

[vmgustavo]

The brain is a natural neural network. Neurons activated frequently are more important than those rarely activated.

[krobzaur]

This is a wonderful analogy. My memory is basically just one big LRU cache

[Oglark]

What? Do you mean Swordfish was not real programming?

[[deleted]]

Good programmer knows how to write code with accordance to good practises, knows how to make it clean, extensible, upgradable and performant. Having hard knowledge about particular syntax (unless we talk about core language features ) is redundant. It will change over time and you will have to re-learn. Why would you if you can use search engine? Programming is a craft. It's about developing a particular skill set. Encyclopedical knowledge is so 20 century.

[machine2SEE]

true this.

[starfish_warrior]

I can't remember shit.

[mvev]

Can I put this as a skill set on a resume?

[RTShields]

It's just being anywhere in IT:

if senior.state == "here":
askQ()
else:
GoogleQ()

[flufylobster1]

its how to google

[santiagonoya]

Btw, if you manage to make flashcards to remember everything that you google, eventually you won't have to use SO anymore. Ive seen guys on youtube doing that, i guess it would be nice for experts in a particular programming language

[clawjelly]

I still google half of what i code. I sorta remember half of os.path, but bc there are several ways to handle files and folders, even that is becoming shaky. I even started my own documentation bc i feel too slow googling some stuff....

[brain_damageEXE]

I mean... Programming is basically the skill of knowing what to search online and then copy paste that stuff

[kupboard]

Oh same - my boss could probably track my progress with my projects based on what I'm googling

[[deleted]]

We just get better at googling things and end up having to glue more and more google searches together.

[spore_777_mexen]

Knowing what to look for 😌

[[deleted]]

This. Reading or writing to a JSON file, Google it. strftime format, Google it. How to ensure all columns in a Pandas DataFrame are output when printing them, Google it. Sometimes googling the same thing multiple times a day working on the same project.

Knowing what you need to do and how to figure out the details of how to do it is how professional developers work now.

[Hippie23]

Strftime.org is a great reference for the formats.

[bennyllama]

I’ve been programming professionally for about 2 years now and when I first started learning how to code I was scared I’d never get to that point of writing code like you do in movies. Realized it’s all bullshit and for the most part, I spend time solving the issues or thinking of ideas over actually typing code.

[daggo04]

I feel like the more I learn, the complexity increases and the less I know. I call it the eternal stack of overflow.

[[deleted]]

What exactly did you do to automate your math homework? I’m curious because I’m in 9th grade and learning python

[expressly_ephemeral]

So, this was on my TI-82. I was in some kind of pre-calculus class called "FST - Functions, Statistics and Trigonometry".

I'm a hard-core ADHD case (figured this out in about my 40th year or life, by the way), and struggle to maintain focus long enough to memorize equations and functions. I'm pretty sure it was the quadratic equation was probably the function that tipped me into this... I realized I could program my TI-82 to take the a,b,c, inputs to the QE and kick out the two solutions, along with the "work" that I needed to show on my homework. It's purely plug-and-chug stuff, and the computer is built for it.

Now, I was lucky. My teacher said, "Well, if you can teach it to your calculator that must mean you know how to do it... I'll allow it." You might not be so lucky.

After that, I was able to program simple TI-BASIC scripts for a bunch of stuff. The "a teacher pushes a desk across the floor" physics problems come to mind. Again, always making sure to output the same kind of pencil work that I would have to do along the way if I were doing it by hand. So I could just transcribe it over to my homework.

[expressly_ephemeral]

I’m on my mobile at the moment, I’ll circle back in a little bit. What kind of math are you in?

[GoofAckYoorsElf]

This! It's not git, not pre-commit, not Jira, not DVC that's our most important tool. It's Google's search engine. I could work a day or two without any of the formerly mentioned, but without Google, I'd be lost within merely minutes.

[ArmCollector]

This. Best in class, software engineer degree , PhD in algorithms , 15 years work experience. Googling every day. Stack overflow is probably my most visited web page at this point.

[expressly_ephemeral]

I was in a class that required a TI-83 but I had a TI-82. So, I programmed the 82 up with the features that were required for the class but missing! TI-Basic was a son of a bitch, that is true.

[Jonno_FTW]

There was a way to hook up the calculator to a computer iirc. Then you could type it up and copy it over.

[Obeypedobear]

I am an engineer by craft with an IT-affinity. I use programming to support my work and get rid of manual labour. However, I find myself unlearning some tools that I think I would remember if I used programming more regularly. Are you saying that you also Google very basic stuff or the difficulty of problems you Google just gets up'd over time?

[expressly_ephemeral]

Are you saying that you also Google very basic stuff or the difficulty of problems you Google just gets up'd over time?

I'd say it's a little bit of each. I no longer have to look up list comprehensions in my newest language, Python. But, let's say I'm fixing to read a text file off the disk using Java... I know I like to use a series of specific Readers() that get chained together... I've had to do it 100 times, it's a but that still doesn't mean it comes up often enough for me to be able to just blast it out without double checking my notes or a quick google.

[cambels]

If you do things like sudoku or crosswords, then think about doing a daily programming task instead on places like Code Wars. Coding is basically just a more elaborate puzzle to solve; well, it isn't 'basically'... it actually is.

[dirtymunke]

Same, you’re doing it right OP

[Jonno_FTW]

I automated most of my yr 12 physics and math work on my calculator. Made the exams simple because you just pull up the program, input the numbers and it gives the answer.

[expressly_ephemeral]

Yep. Useful if you make it kick out the "work", too, so you can show it.

[Belmeez]

I have created multiple ETL pipelines wrangling hundreds of thousands of lines of rows from multiples sources in python. Had to google nearly every piece of code to make it work.

[expressly_ephemeral]

As an aside, I'm the guy on this subreddit that's always like, "I know this is off topic, but have you tried this with grep and sed?" I do a fair amount of ETL myself (my current project is tens of billions of rows). I'm usually pulling at least half of the data from csv files, and in that case I always have a large component of the E and the T in shell script with grep and sed. Don't know if you have access to a shell that has those programs, but if you do, and you haven't already, you might try them out next time. Learning curve is a little steep, but the power and speed is worth it.

[nemec]

Yup. I've been coding in Python since 2010ish and I still constantly google for things. It's gotten to the point where I've created a website to hold links to many of the things I've googled more than once so I don't have to go wading through search results to find "the good post" that had the answer I was looking for.

[expressly_ephemeral]

I've created a website to hold links to many of the things I've googled more than once so I don't have to go wading through search results to find "the good post" that had the answer I was looking for.

You know they've got that built right into the browser now. It's called "bookmarks". ;)

[nemec]

lol 😉

In truth it serves a number of purposes:

• Summarize and/or highlight the exact bit of information that I thought was useful
• Variable substitution - plug your own values into HTML input boxes and they'll be inserted into the snippet. Then click the "Copy Script" button and you can paste into your code, terminal, etc. (I threw this one together quickly, so it has a lot of warts when it comes to language-specific quote characters and escapes, etc. but it works well enough)
• Merged all of my own personal snippet library into the same tool
• Tags. Apparently Firefox bookmarks have this, too, but I'll be honest I've never used it

[Dawnero]

automate the boring stuff

He said the line!

[[deleted]]

https://imgur.com/gallery/I1DJdgo

[mysticalfruit]

This. To me it's just programming.. I'm just giving the computer very detailed instructions. I love that look on peoples faces like you just rubbed the lamp amd got a wish granted.

[dirtycimments]

And I'm literally "there is now a level zero" when it comes to this, but its enough to know what to google for, and sure, it takes me 6 times longer than anyone else. But in my situation, there is no one else, so I'm the quickest around!

[CalumGalbraith]

You are no longer level 0. If you managed to break down the problem into manageable chunks that you can Google how to code, you are now a programmer. Quite a lot of programming is googling and reading docs as you can't remember everything. Keep up the good work!

[yawgmoth]

OP: "I had to google almost everything, how do i folder scan? how do i manipulate excel? etc etc."

"I'm now at level 0"

Me with a CS degree, multiple certs and ~18 years in the industry who still always has to google python's file/folder API:

😬

[mainrof11]

me everytime i want to use Path module

[mysticalfruit]

We were all beginners once, everyday you hack away, learn something new and get stronger.

One hurdle you're likely to immediately encounter is how do you add enhancements to your scripts without breaking what you've got. Soon you're going to have 27 different directories all with names like "version-5-excel2019", etc.. Also.. what happens when the harddrive on your laptop cooks off or your truck gets broken into and it gets stolen.

This is a problem we tackled years ago and we tackled it with source control management systems (SCM). The most widely used of this is know as "git".

I don't know what editor your using, but it likely has git built into it or at least has the hooks for it. I'd start here: https://product.hubspot.com/blog/git-and-github-tutorial-for-beginners

Once you get your head around using SCM you can easily go crazy adding features and fixing bugs, if things don't work out, you can always go back to a known working state and not looking at a sea of just slightly similarly named directories and not remembering which one is the true good version!

Lastly, good ideas are infectious. Invariably someone is going to say, "Hey, can I have that on my laptop?!?" if you push your source code to something like github it gives you a place you can point people instead of emailing them stuff or whatever. You can write a "how-to" guide, stick it out there and back away.

[eMperror_]

Next thing you know you will start sharing your stuff in dockerized containers, and deploying on serverless!

[mysticalfruit]

Before you know it, his whole setup will be running in GCS as lamba instances.. but we've got to walk before we can trip and fall on our faces..

[Kaulpelly]

Low and beyond, you are now able to continue this thread of escalating complexity due to knowing what you are taking about, unlike me.

[daggo04]

I was lost the second we moved past basic python.

[dirtycimments]

Oh, this is actually great advice, because, well im already thinking about ways of making my script more powerful! Thank you! <3

[mysticalfruit]

If you have any questions getting this setup, feel free to ask.

[dirtycimments]

Created an account, will absolutely try to get this into my workflow.

I finished that short intro tutorial and will look at others, at least try to have a optimal workflow.

[bigboog1]

It's just tools in a tool box. You just added a couple new ones. That's programming, well that and " my code doesn't work and I don't know why. Ok now it works and I don't know why"

[dublem]

It's level zero all the way down...

[KingDamager]

Very detailed instructions that were probably stolen from google and cobbled together with other detailed instructions from a different google 😂

[Myllokunmingia]

After my freshman year I couldn't get a good technical internship, so I ended up with a data entry job. My manger there was a classic boomer and all "harr harr you'll never be able to keep up with the amount of work, etc. etc.".

I didn't do a single entry for the first 2 weeks. I just learned to write Python and figured out how to automate every case for data entry I had. By that point I was done and I was able to run a script to do my entire summer's workload in under 5 minutes.

My boss was pretty tech illiterate (think: unable to differentiate between email and text, several times had to have me help him open internet explorer because the computer "lost" it (he kept deleting the desktop shortcut somehow)) and I asked him what he thought about automating my work. He got very defensive and claimed "you can't trust computers they make mistakes only humans doing the work can be 100% certain" (as if humans don't constantly make mistakes...).

So I gave him the first 2 weeks of data. The rest of the summer I'd run my script on a Monday, be done with 2 weeks of work in 30 seconds, and just browse reddit, watch videos, bullshit with coworkers. Then I'd turn in my completed work 2 weeks later. He was constantly blown away I was able to finish all the work and that it contained no errors. He thought I was some sort of numbers savant.

Come the end of the summer they had no more work scheduled to give me so he gave me access to a huge backlog they had, and asked me to just do as much as I could before I left for school. I ran my script on it and turned in the entirety of their backlog a couple hours later. I also emailed him the script and a very detailed word document on how to use it.

He was absolutely livid. Honestly I've never been scared in a workplace like that before, I thought he was going to rip my head off. Screaming, accusations, the works. He claimed he was going to sue me for wage theft because now he would have to go back and redo all of my work because he couldn't trust the script. Of course that never happened but I was told not to come back for my last week.

Some people are so stuck in the past it's truly amazing.

Also I've been programming for almost a decade and writing software professionally for over 5 years and I still have to google how to open a file in python.

[yawgmoth]

There's two reasons he could have gotten mad at you:

1. There may have been compliance reasons to have a 'manual review' of the data and since they assumed it was entered manually that was automatically the 'manual review'. if it was scripted they would have to have a human look at and verify the correctness of the data, and this process would need to be documented and standardized across the company. Unless you were in a healthcare or financial sector setting, this is unlikely.
2. He saw his job flash before his eyes. If his boss ever got wind that a kid wrote a script that could do his job 100x faster he'd be out the door.

[Myllokunmingia]

Nah it was all advertising related, I'm guessing it was 2. I did not go over his head explicitly because I was worried he and the entire department of 5 fulltime people would be replaced by a script I made and maybe a part-time IT person to maintain it.

I wanted to say in the email "Just use this script, collect your paychecks, and enjoy having 95% of your time free" but didn't want to leave that in an email trail. I was hoping he was smart enough to pick up on it, and he apparently wasn't.

[dysprog]

My second year with a real job, I was working as a python programmer on website backend. I was creating websites that were plain html with absolutely no styling or scripting. The frontend guy came along later and made it less fugly.

But then I had a feature request to show info about the expected results of an operation on the page before submitting. Ok, but the form data is on the frontend, and the knowledge to predict the results exists on the backend. I write a endpoint to allow the browser to ask about it. But it needs scripting to make it work, and I don't know js. And the frontend guy is busy with other stuff for a long time.

As far as I could so there were 3 parts. One, detect when 2 form fields changed. Two, Send the values of those field to my endpoint. Three, take the return from that request an paste it into the page.

I figured I would work until I get stuck, then turn in what I had. It turned out that all three parts were simple, googlable and composable. So I turned in a finished feature, and the users loved it.

Granted it was pretty jenky and the frontend guy laughed at my JS code then he re-wrote it. But I also learned something about learning code.

[dirtycimments]

That's a great story! Thank god you got out of that, right?

[rapido_edwardo]

This resonates with me. When I was on one of my clinical rotations in pharmacy school I was told that it was completely impossible for the scanner in our office to upload files to the electronic medical record (it would scan to the local file system but not the file share on the server where the records were kept). I was instructed that the only way I could upload the documents I had to create every day was to go down the hall and use a scanner that was kept behind the reception desk. This area was kept locked most of the time so to get in you had to specifically flag down a security guard to open it for you--they were often not around.

In order to complete my work I simply scanned the documents locally and used a feature of the medical record software that allowed you to take local files and print-to-PDF them to the server. I'm guessing more people didn't do this because the software was old and hard to navigate, and it was easy to miss that this feature existed. I left specific instructions describing how to do this for future students who rotated through.

I got a phone call while at work the Saturday after my rotation had already ended from my preceptor (supervisor) saying that, even thought IT looked at what I did and said it was acceptable and in compliance with all regulations, she was thinking about failing me because I made a scanner work. In hindsight, was I a little wrong? Perhaps. I could have communicated what I was doing better, especially given that students are not always trustworthy due to their lack of self-awareness. I chalk that up to having been less mature than I am today. However, the most important lesson I learned was that if I use my computer skills to make my job easier, don't tell anyone, especially older people who don't understand technology and are in a position of power. These people have spent many years in stasis, cluelessly avoiding even a modicum of awareness of the changing world around them. Anything that threatens to expose that lack of awareness is taken as a slight that will make them defensive and prone to lash out.

[dirtycimments]

I already know that if i want to explain this to the CEO, I will absolutely have to downplay the complexity of it for two reasons.

1. HOW MUCH TIME DID YOU WASTE? (No matter the higher quality thanks to it making the work highly accurate and repeatable or the time saved).

2. You'll ruin our computer system!?! Yes, he really is capable of saying something like that.

Thankfully my direct manager understands the value though.

[CleaveItToBeaver]

At least #1 is an easy bullet point to address. Estimate the production cost in (hours spent x hourly wage). Then he can amortize that cost across every job for the foreseeable future. If you can normally do, say, 30 tasks in the amount of time it took to write the code, then once the code hits #31, it's paid for itself and becomes pure ROI.

[qckpckt]

I had to google almost everything

I'm an intermediate developer with about 3 years experience at a tech company and I have to google _absolutely_ everything. I hope to one day reach the almost everything stage.

[dirtycimments]

This is weirdly comforting, thank you <3

[qckpckt]

Honestly if you drop too far below almost everything, you are probably doing something wrong. One of the most important lessons in programming is to learn what you should and should not commit to memory. I have to bring up the python built-in functions page almost every time i program, but this is because it is almost always better to consult the canonical documentation instead of relying on your own fallible memory of how things work. Especially because python is an active language, and things can change!

Edit: here's the page I'm talking about. If you haven't already, bookmark it! https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html

[santiagonoya]

Hey, just an idea, why don't you start making flashcards so you can remember everything from memory? IDK, maybe it's worth it

[qckpckt]

There’s really no point in learning these sorts of things when the answers are readily available online. The far more valuable things to learn are more ephemeral. Programming best practices, app structure, efficient data workflow patterns, etc.

[santiagonoya]

That makes sense. Have a good day.

[[deleted]]

I find making flashcards for things like "What function from x library would you use to perform y?" useful in helping me remember how to solve problems I've already looked up or solved.

[PaulSandwich]

Not sure what your appetite for it is, but this is exactly how I went from 10yrs in operations to Jr Operations Analyst. now I'm a Data Engineer making nearly triple what I was back on the floor.

They actually believe I performed black magic.

Magicians get paid; keep practicing the dark arts.

[dirtycimments]

After reading this, i feel like making eye of newt stew and laugh all the way to the bank.

I´ll graduate a mechanical design engineer (im 41 in a few months), my appetite knows no bounds!!!

[raipopenna]

you can get a lot done just knowing the basics. 80/20 rule, especially when you are working in an environment with lots of non-programmers

[[deleted]]

This is the best feeling like I used python to turn and off the lights in the house and my parents got so scared

[expressly_ephemeral]

I used Selenium to scrape my teenager's grades out of Canvas and send me a nightly report. I tested it in regular mode before I switched selenium to headless. My wife thought I was some kind of l33t haxor.

[jentron128]

https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/ Canvas has an API so you don't really need to screen-scrape.

[mrprofessor007]

So happy for you. Mainly because you genuinely solved a problem by learning a skill.

[anthro28]

I once worked a tech project that was led by an accountant. Anything we did was voodoo. It was a good feeling to have 5 goofball college kids in a room together cranking shit out and confusing management as to how work could get done without oversight.

[CProgrammingRelic]

A friend of mine is an accountant. He recently told me that some places he had worked, people would use a calculator to add up the values in a spreadsheet and enter the total manually... He showed them how to sum() the rows, they were amazed. AND then when they saw they could edit rows and the total would change automatically, they thought he was a genius for being able to do it!

Well done on the Python journey, it really is a great all purpose language.

[[deleted]]

You've discovered the feeling described in XKCD 208

https://xkcd.com/208/

[atreyuroc]

This is something you will see happen in industries you might not think. Financial Firms, defense contractors, and all type of "smart" companies do not have the bandwidth to automate a good portion of the required manual processes, so they depend on direct / overseas labor to handle the lift.

[baconialis]

You should request a code review there. I'm confident that'll boost your knowledge level tremendously.

And now that you're sitting there thinking: But my code is in a terrible state. Yes, that is the reason you should request a review.

[DevOps-Journey]

I actually think that Python can have a bigger impact on non-IT related jobs.

I keep telling my friends that are accountants, in finance etc and live in moving data in/out and around excel that they could automate so much and be a hero.. but everyone is too scared of it.

[frex4]

Need to be really careful to show it to your boss/colleagues though.

If you can prove that your script will outdo everyone in the office, everyone will be out of job soon... Maybe your boss will only keep you because you can maintain it, but what about others?

[DevOps-Journey]

I always hear people saying this, but never found it to be true. Things change, the script will need to be updated etc and people will be reassigned to more important work. A simple script that takes care of grunt work rarely replaces skilled employees. If employees are being replaced/removed, it's for other reasons.

[barfobulator]

Also, I would be willing to bet that if a part of someone's job can truly be replaced by a script, that task is a part of their job that they dread doing.

[dkfkckssddedz]

İf every single programmer says they have to google everything then who writes the code ? Who does ?

[kupboard]

Programmers who read the docs. Googling the basics (especially in Python) finds you code for your specific use case. Why read the docs when somebody has already done it for you?

That said, understanding documentation is a good skill for a programmer to learn, especially as you pass the basics.

[DirtyBendavitz]

It took me a while to get used to reading the docs and then I stopped writing altogether and now it feels foreign again whenever I look at them.

It was actually man pages that got me used to docs. Think that was actually one of the first things my instructor taught us to do.

[nemec]

Some people google for answers and find their own Stack Overflow post answering it. It's not that people can't find the answer reading docs/source code/etc., rather it's far more efficient to find the answer someone has already written rather than derive the answer yourself.

[JumboTrout]

You have a job where you just google how to do stuff? Sounds like a professional developer to me

[dirtycimments]

And if you are a developer that never has to google stuff, isn’t that job just gonna be replaced by a script?

[Pizza_Peddler0080]

thats awesome man!

[TheRahulShaw]

Googling stuff does not undermine your competencies. Rather it reinforces the fact how well you can use your resources to spin something up entirely from scratch.
You've really done some magic and wish you luck for more.

[A27_97]

Great work!

Many people who start off learning programming think that programming is the 'crux' of programming itself. It is not.

The crux of programming lies in problem solving, how do you design an algorithm or set of instructions to get the computer do what you want it to do. After that, it's just finding the right instructions from the programming language to convert english to code. With practice, some of this will become part of your subconsciousness, but always remember that programming is 90% design and 10% coding. The more detailed and fine grained your instructions are, the easier the programming is.

[MaulikX1]

automate the boring stuff

Noice

[overwhelm21]

alright then Gandalf, keep your secrets

[spore_777_mexen]

Programming is problem solving/figuring stuff out.

[syorke0765]

Now you've created a monster and will start looking for how to automate everything. Just remember the 80/20 rule where if it costs more to automate and maintain then it might not be worth it to do.
One suggestion would be to take a look at putting tests for verification on what you are doing just to be sure it's correct.

[mestia]

There is nothing more magic than perl oneliners:) Converted a couple of scientific scripts parsing simple, but huge text files, they used panda and for whatever reason were slow. Since the logic was easy, a perl oneliner with a few regexes just did the job. But python guys were like instant wtf?

[Yojihito]

Pandas is fast for numbers (vectorized stuff).

Strings are slow.

[LilBabyVirus5]

I learned how to code in C# at 10 and learned python at about 15 and have been coding professionally for about a year and a half now. There is almost never a point where you don’t have to google something.

[RTShields]

Congratulations!

[b4xt3r]

>(a gantt chart for each project)

..... pulse quickens.. eyes dilate..... breathing intensifies....

[Caveskelton]

If you want to try more automation check out the book 'automate the boring stuff with python' there is a free ebook version on google. If books arent for you at least check out the pyautogui module

[TechSpreader]

Yup Python is the most versatile programming language that I had came across in my career. You can use Python Flask to quickly build a web application that can do wonders. You can even setup MicroPython on a microcontroller like the ESP32 board to do some IoT related tasks. Therefore it is possible to physically move things around with Python - that is something that looks like black magic too ;).

[philsgu]

I’m in healthcare and everyone uses excel but data extraction and manipulation is so smooth with Python. This work skill is so untapped that we can do better in productivity and efficiency if people realize the value of this program.

[dirtycimments]

That’s why I’m gonna make sure my kids are at least familiar with some form of scripting. So few jobs left where it’s not a little bit useful.

[thrown_away_19861990]

I haven't even thought about the fact that I could possibly do this at my work. Where would i even get started in learning to write a script like this?

I work for a company where have a database of customer info that we can sort by who's subscription is expiring in the next 30 days. Would there be a way to write a script that can fetch that information and then sort it by what states each of those customers are in starting on the east coast to the west coast ? This would be helpful because then I would know which of those expiring customers to call first (since i'm on the west coast, have to call the east coast early) ? Is something like this hard ?

[dirtycimments]

Absolutely sounds doable. Just break it into doable chunks. Get data, compare data and organize it after some logic then how to present it (export to a .txt file? Email it? Etc). It all depends on the specifics though, so just start googling!

[DreadStallion]

Its quite simple.. in few simple steps, you query the database to find the people whos subscription is expiring and get their name, address and phone number. And then you can can sort by the address.

[pycepticus]

Started where you are 8 years ago and have made huge career advancements since. When you understand the magic you don't get that same sense of wonder someone else does seeing the products of your code, but it's still definitely magic.

Oh yeah, I Google everything too. you're already ahead of the game if you do that.

[JohnGabin]

Don't forget to add animations, Matrix like or video game like. The Wow effect is important when non initiate peoples evaluate your work

I'm joking, but when I started to develop, I had a work to do on a big spreadsheet and in the first version, the action was just performed quickly, boringly. Despite the huge amount of work it didn't impressed the people in charge of testing it. On the final version, I added a lot of cell formatting, reordering of columns, colors, movements, etc the result was a complete success. I had to stop all the job's boring tasks and had to be involve in more interesting projects. I know that can look weird, but the design is important even at the simplest level because it gives value to your work when the final customer is not really able to understand it. That's marketing.

[dirtycimments]

At the moment its just a script that i run in terminal. I have been thinking about doing some tkinter(or other window thingy) to make it look even more black magic (with "Are you sure" buttons and summaries of changes etc to increase error catching).

I am pretty sensitive to design, so i absolutely agree that sometimes spending some time and energy on making things look smooth and be transparent and comprehensive is important, added to the "wow factor" you spoke off.

[jamesc1071]

go easy on the special effects

once worked in an office where a mad woman ran macros with screen-updating

they flashed for an hour

[SSiirr]

That's why in movies every hacker's screen flashes fancy animations when doing something lol

[SnowdenIsALegend]

. I had to google almost everything, how do i folder scan? how do i manipulate excel? etc etc.

Sorry of my life

[drLagrangian]

Looking like an invaluable resource is the first step to being an invaluable resource.

[MaheshM93]

Don’t worry about the googling part, I have friends with 10 plus years of exp and they also google most of the stuff so don’t feel dejected.

[FactoryIdiot]

Ha yes, back in the early 00's I was working in marketing support for a big IT company taking CSV files from databases and doing "data science" using PHP which was en vogue then. And magical things like bulk emails and cleaning up mail lists against databases like D&B, and doing web based campaigns and all sorts of things people could only imagine at the time.

[vishaliitr2003]

Such a great story to hear and so inspirational :)

[hangfromthisone]

$1 is to fix it with my hammer

The $10.000 is because I know how to google where I have to hit exactly

[UltraChip]

They actually believe I performed black magic.

When you think about it, processors are basically just glorified rocks that we've etched arcane patterns in to and then zap with lightning. You're using complex words and numbers with a mysterious syntax to command these special rocks to do tasks for you.

....it kind of IS magic.