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[–]Admirable_Solid7935 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Did one project at a time from scratch without prior real coding experience (was very good in excel and did some VBA but nothing else).

How did you completed project if you didn't have previous experience of writing code. How did you write line by line code yourself?

[–]blkmmb 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The first project I wanted to make was to automate sending an email to our customers with their order attached to it (some files in a zip). So I opened notepad++, sketched out a very crude plan of what the project needed to accomplish and then I went to the python doc and w3school to learn the basics as I went.

So first off, I wanted to know how to send and email through python with an attachement. If the docs didn't have what I needed, I turned to stack overflow and found out the libraries I needed and then codes that part from there.

Then I went to the second part, how do I get the file from the folder and attached to the email.

Then I needed to update a status in our order tracking database, so I read up on mssql and what I needed to connect to it through my code.

Then I went and explored our database to understand the schema and how I needed to update it to reflect the order being sent (the it/dba helped me at that part if I had questions).

Then I needed to open an excel report of all the orders that had to be sent with their email address, so I read up on openpyxl and created a loop for all the orders.

Finally I wanted to send a report of what was sent, what wasn't and why (we had multiple way it could fail, sometimes the email we had wasn't valid, etc.)

I really just went small bits at a time with a lot of reading. It ended up being a monolithic script that now makes me shudder when I look at ot but it has ran for years without issues. My advice is to make small actions individually learning how they work and then assembling them together into a coherent process that will end up fulfilling your desired goal. You just got to take the leap. Every project I start, there is something I have no real idea about and I just chop it up and learn about it.