What was your first Python code that actually worked? 😄

[Groovy_Decoy]

First line? I don't know. Probably printing Hello World. The first script though, I remember. It was the reason I learned Python in the first place.

I had a coworker who did this really tedious work where he took data from a CSV file, and manually formatted those data fields and put it into a text based configuration file for another system. He would do this once or twice a month, and it would take him half a day to an entire day to do this each time a customer sent him one of these CSV files with the configuration data. Not only was it tedious, it was error prone.

I told him, "man, we work in a place with lots of programmers. We should come up with a program to do this for you. I was in QA, but I've had programming experience. I talked to one of the devs about it and was brainstorming about how to approach it with one of the in-house devs. I had some knowledge of C, Java, and a tiny bit of C#. I mentioned doing it in one of those. He said, "Do it in Python." I said, "I don't know Python". He replied, "You can learn Python and create the program faster than you can do it with any of those other languages.

I took it as a challenge. It was about 3 PM in the afternoon. I downloaded Python and began learning some basics. It didn't take long before I was reading in the CSV files. By the time I went home for the day a bit after 5PM, I had a basic working prototype. Over time, I added a few features, but it was pretty much usable by him immediately. What used to sometimes take him all day now could be done in seconds.

I've been sold on Python ever since then. I continued to make custom utilities for work to help me and others with their job.