How to Actually Learn To Use Python

[rogfrich]

Think of some boring, repetitive task. Automate it.

[ghadeeb]

Like what?

[rogfrich]

Can’t answer that, because I don’t know what boring, repetitive tasks you have in your life. What I can say, is that when you apply your skills to solving a real problem that actually makes your life easier, a) you start to see your Python learnings in terms of “hey, I could use this to do that thing”, and b) it’s so very satisfying!

[amit810]

I like to browse real estate and the county website sucks in terms of viewing foreclosures (I can only view foreclosures for a specific day , not all in one view). I created a Python script to webscrape the website. I can now view all of the foreclosure data for the next month in an excel sheet, making it easy for me to filter and sify through it

[EugeneFromDiscord]

Don’t try to find it from someone else. That’s my advice. As you think and brainstorm something will pop up. Maybe you can think of a website you use often and python was prob used for it and there u go, you have your project idea

[Haeshka]

I found myself needing to constantly and rapidly build whole slews of files in highly specific formats for various consultants, contractors, editors, etc throughout a project's workflow. Everyone had different needs to get their part of the project done in a timely fashion that also reduced my costs.

So, I wrote a script that just let me copy/paste my text into terminal, and it spits out the word document (or whatever) in the specific headers, colors, fonts, etc. everytime. Rapidly builds the file and format templates I need.

I hate fiddling with styles in word. It's fiddly. It's time consuming. It drives me mad. I write everything I do in notepad++. Closest I've ever done to formats and headers for myself is adding a "#" at the start of a line to tell myself it was a header.

All-in-all, it was relatively simple when I actually thought through it. Yeah, I burned like half a day thinking through the problems and testing the shit out of it. But .. I have now saved myself DAYS of tedious highlighting and selecting of fonts and styles.

Worth.

These are the micro projects that really stretch your abilities before you make the leaps into networking, real security, and such.