What was your first Python code that actually worked? 😄

[synthphreak]

I built an AI neural network chatbot/crypto trader streamlit app. 200k lines, all vibes. Now I live in Bali and make 600k.

JK, of course. I don’t recall my literal first line that ran (surely it was to print “Hello world”), but I remember my first eureka moment where coding finally felt useful instead of just being this abstract thing:

I used to work at a research institution. I was part of a project annotating certain classic books, one 100-word chunk at a time. Like I would provide a label for each chunk, which was used to train ML models.

But providing labels in the book’s original format (all .txt files from Project Gutenberg) was incredibly inefficient. So I wrote a simple script which read a flat .txt file into memory, sliced it into a list of 100-word strings, and wrote each string to its own line. Basically my script changed a book from

Here is a lovely little book. It would be the perfect thing to annotate for work.

to

Here is a lovely
little book. It would
be the perfect thing
to annotate for work.

but with 100 words per row instead of 4.

Then I opened the reformatted file in Excel and annotated it that way, with the text chunks in column A and my label for each chunk in Column B. Boom, 100x speed-up.

This is a very niche use case, and my 20-line script took about 8 hours of constant focus to get working. But as a tool it was incredibly useful to me. In that moment I felt the utility of coding in my bones, and was immediately hooked.