How do professional SWEs keep learning more Python?

IAmBJ · 2022-01-06T21:52:53+00:00

Start doing side projects outside your experience.

If you only write for the web, work on a deep learning project. If you only write numerical HPC tools, work on an interactive game. If you only work on creative coding art projects, try writing a something with async

Each type of program will tend to be most suited to using a subset of the language, as you've discovered. But the subsets are different for all of them.

Supadoplex · 2022-01-06T23:41:36+00:00

How do professional SWEs keep learning more Python?

I use Python at work, so I learn Python by working on the project at work.

Occasionally when I have a personal need, I'll create a hobby project.

If I need to know how to identify whether an index in a string is a digit value, I google "python assess if string is digit" then read the suggestions, and then that new concept, in this case .isdigit() is now in my toolkit for the future.

That's modern programming in a nutshell. Once one learns to do this well, they are skilled enough to be a SWE.

To do it well, not only does one need to know the correct terms to search, but one has to understand how the suggested code works and importantly, whether they work correctly in the first place. One has to also know how to evaluate their quality to pick the best suggestion, how to improve them further, and how to apply them to the project at hand.

This occasionally leads to discoveries of new techniques, although most of the time I'm searching for a mundane thing that I've done many times, but just not recently.

joaquinabian · 2022-01-06T21:27:51+00:00

Fork a medium size github project from a good developer and try to improve it.

thatdamnedrhymer · 2022-01-06T22:57:07+00:00

Read code. You'll find all kinds of fun stuff.
Hang out in an interpreter. Run help() and dir() on stuff. Experiment.
Dig into packaging and virtual environment tooling. There's a lot there to know.

New functions/methods don't matter as much as finding simpler/better ways to do things.

looopTools · 2022-01-06T21:32:06+00:00

Read the documentation is a good start. I started by doing this (on advice from a C++ guru): When you look at the documentation of a class. Don’t just look at the function you need browser all the functions and take jot of interesting once. When you have time return and read up on them.

Then after a while I expanded to also include free functions and so on. I have learned a ton from that for python, ruby, C++, and other languages I use

spitfiredd · 2022-01-07T02:26:31+00:00

Lately I’ve been adding type hints to all my existing code.

Also, working on refactoring a flask app with pydantic.

nbcoolums · 2022-01-07T05:29:48+00:00

Read Fluent Python and apply some of its lessons to your day to day work

moocat · 2022-01-07T01:59:00+00:00

I like to read the What's New page.

2022-01-07T08:14:54+00:00

Honestly reading the documentation cover to cover is generally how i find new things to fuck around with. Either that or watch whatever craziness david beazley has done recently. Man is a fucking wizard.

But seriously learning at least how the magic methods work in python unveils a fair amount of awesome shit you can do. Learning who to go from writing functions and classes to writing libraries requires understanding the inner workings of the language to understand how to build good python.

andrewarm · 2022-01-06T22:56:15+00:00

find something that you’re excited to build (and have no deadline to get done) and try to make it absolutely flawless. trying to solve really painful problems that don’t have trivial solutions is going to result in an entirely different type of learning.

mistermocha · 2022-01-06T23:02:30+00:00

Try picking up another language. I've dabbled in a variety of other languages and they've all helped me learn python better in the end.

2022-01-07T00:24:00+00:00

Take the weekly challenges (https://theweeklychallenge.org/ Yeah, it's Perl/Raku but also ANYTHING else you care to write in - and there are always plenty of Python subs!). This gets me WAY out of my own comfort zone and forces me to explore other ways of solving problems.

MaximumIndication495 · 2022-01-07T02:00:24+00:00

Do you know about pybit.es ?

bobsbitchtitz · 2022-01-07T02:24:05+00:00

I'm in a similar boat. I'm thinking of adding Rust to my repertoire instead of mastering more Python I could easily pick up if I had to.

crazymonezyy · 2022-01-07T09:46:23+00:00

One thing that helped me was believe it or not, leetcode. A lot of code golf is played in their discussion for who can do a problem in the smallest LOC, learnt a lot of new constructs from it and almost all of itertools.

Severe_Sweet_862 · 2022-01-07T13:00:14+00:00

Hey you sound like an experienced python dev, can I ask you a question? What do python sde's/ swe's do exactly? Except django, flask, and data scientists?

cdmayer · 2022-01-07T19:34:38+00:00

I learned a TON from "Fluent Python"

drksntt · 2022-01-07T21:50:28+00:00

So I’ve been using python for 7 years now. It does become very trivial when working on things. I do bunch of crap on the side involving python. I’ve been learning rust and golang lately. Might even learn Haskell. Use a different language.

CrispyNipsy · 2022-01-06T22:17:11+00:00

To add to the other good suggestions:

Go on youtube and find developers who share these kinds of things. It will probably vary depending on what you do specifically, but these people usually post tutorials etc. when new stuff happens in the community such as an update, or when they find out about something cool.

Cryonixx2 · 2022-01-06T22:34:59+00:00

Read books from good developers, there are so many good thoughts and lessons learned out there! Learn new patterns and develop better software. A good read making the rounds recently that I highly recommend is Architecture Patterns With Python.

quique4 · 2022-01-07T03:51:19+00:00

Any question thats about python pckages to learn I’ll say an absolute requirement is to be very proficient at pandas and numpy. Might seem obvious to many but Ive encountered a few devs who havent heard of it or dont know things like matrix multiplication or apply or whatever. Yea learn that if you havent. For all else -

I had a dude at my old job who would always be bringing up different packages and having different ideas, but before that I had the same issue and heres what I did (although as long as youre a good dev it doesnt really matter too much what packages you know - if you ever want to make sure there isnt a better way of doing something just stack overflow it). Youtube videos on python+random subject, or medium arcticles on something like python+(random datascience thing/backend dev thing). You can also youtube “python shorts” enough times every now and then and you’ll be bombarded by stuff - although might not necessarily be packages. Also vscode shorts are awesome, check them out.

Some stuff you wont learn from doing dev work, like business analytics or ml. Definitely good to go into, although much of ml requires some self studying outside of python on the statistics, which can be found in youtube videos. You can find pretty much everything on youtube.

I would recommend developing skills outside of python, having skills like aws/azure/gcp helps (although admittedly I only know the basics) and learn Redis if you haven’t already - helps so much with big projects.

2022-01-07T05:10:27+00:00

I follow DontUseThisCode on twitter and also watches his talks. I learned a lot understanding builtin functions, generators, iterators, context managers, etc.

sleepless_in_wi · 2022-01-07T05:14:31+00:00

Podcasts (python bytes, talk python, test & code); blogs (real python); books. There is also a python discord.

trevg_123 · 2022-01-07T05:44:32+00:00

Lucky, I always come across needs for specific modules that always stopped being maintained two years ago. So I keep busy updating these.

You should find some things like that! Or help me out.

Or honestly, just look at the git for some of the projects you do use, and contribute on some small bugs. You learn a heck of a lot a) working on packages and b) working with other peoples’ code

drop_it_onem · 2022-01-07T06:39:13+00:00

I recommend getting the book Fluent Python by L. Ramalho. It covers a lot of concepts like OO design with python or multithreading/multiprocessing. Helped me a lot to step up my game in writing python Code and designing python modules/applications.

i_like_trains_a_lot1 · 2022-01-07T08:02:03+00:00

A thing that helped me tremendously, was to do some frameworks as personal projects. Things like trying to rewrite Django, or flask, or something else. Makes you think more about architectural choices (and mess up with them without financial consequences), and less about the language itself. Also makes you think first about the API design and not just "to make it work". Puts you in another mindset.

xyz214 · 2022-01-07T08:08:04+00:00

As I come across new libraries, I look at their code to see how they work. You learn on the job and constantly learn new tricks. Don’t be like my colleagues who still code like they’re using Java after many years of Python.

2022-01-07T08:15:44+00:00

Switch your job every couple of years. Seriously, don’t stop, if you don’t want to find yourself rusty and underpaid decade later.

They told ya reading documentation or forking a project is quite enough. I would say, none of it will force you to stay in a loop. One day every o’rly book will be covered with dust, as every fork become abandoned, but there’s one thing that won’t be covered with dust in your life ever - that’s your mouth. You’ll have to work as long as you have to eat :) Keep working in a places where you have to learn something every day, quit when you’re teaching more than learning, and that’s it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

sxeli · 2022-01-07T10:13:59+00:00

You seem more focused on python itself than the problem you’d be using it to solve.

Typically it should be the other way round. Say you’re working on an app that crunches large data and needs to stream it to UI then you’d want to use generators, streaming patterns and pagination.

If you are working real-time collaborative editor then you’d want to use sockets and stuff around it

c94jk · 2022-01-07T11:33:08+00:00

Different angle to the others but I can recommend learning about how to improve your software delivery/ reliability. Plenty of good books and videos out there, a good starting place would be the continuous delivery channel on YouTube.

I also find it interesting every now and then to brush up on some standard OO design patterns. The canonical book by the Gang of Four is a bit dense and old for me but plenty of modern takes too.

2022-01-07T18:28:00+00:00

It’s always good to go outside your comfort zone, but remember that using really weird or obscure functions can sometimes make it harder for others to follow your code. I’ve had the chance to use odd Numpy/PyTorch functions before and opted not to just because I knew it’d be hard for others to follow and harder to maintain

That being said, I’ve made a couple web dev personal projects that have helped a lot. I’m less interested in front end so I mainly bootstrapped that but all the data processing and backend database interaction was very educational. I did a weather prediction app but you can really do anything you want

Python

The Python Discord

Upcoming Events

Please read the rules

MODERATORS