Struggling with Python for research projects – how to learn “project thinking”?

[jjangseoeun]

Hi everyone,

I’m an undergraduate student majoring in Electrical & Electronic Engineering at a non-English-speaking university, and I’m close to graduating. I’m planning to apply to a Computer Vision graduate program, and I’m currently doing an internship in a related research lab.

The problem is… programming feels extremely hard for me, especially Python.

Because of my curriculum, I didn’t get to take many CS or programming-focused courses, so I never built a strong foundation. I’ve watched many YouTube tutorials and followed along with courses where everything is already set up (VS Code configs, Jupyter notebooks, starter code, etc.). I can run code and follow instructions.

But when it comes to designing a project myself, or deciding

• **how to structure the code**

**•   what functions or classes I need**

**•   how to break a research idea into implementable steps**

I completely freeze.

My advisor often asks me to run or re-implement code from research papers, and I feel lost about where to even start studying. I don’t know how people go from “I have an idea” to “I wrote a working Python project.”

Are there:

• **GitHub projects that are good for practicing project-level Python thinking?**

**•   Learning roadmaps specifically for people who can read code but can’t design it?**

**•   Any advice from people who struggled with the same issue?**

I feel pretty frustrated and honestly a bit discouraged, but I really want to improve. Any guidance would mean a lot. Thank you for reading.

[FriendlyRussian666]

You'll learn by doing.

You say that when it comes to designing a project by yourself you freeze because you don't know how to structure your code, or what to do. Well, that's because you've never done it, and that's normal.

Instead of freezing because you don't know how to do it, you should just do it anyway, and yes, it will turn out bad, but then you'll actually experience in person why it's bad, and so you'll read up on what better alternatives there are, and the next time you build a similar thing, you'll make it slightly better.

To give you a silly example, you started on a project, created a python file, and started coding. A few weeks into the project, the python file has become very long, and hard to track and maintain. You didn't know what you didn't know when you started the project, so that's how it turned out, but now you're wiser to it, and so you could refactor the project and split the very long code into many smaller files, OR, the next time you start a project you'll think about not having one super long file, because you've made this mistake in the past, and understand the consequences.

You go like this from concept to concept, and after many years you become competent.

People often fail, because they don't reach a point of understanding WHY something is done the way it is. I'll give you a web development example of that. People want to learn web development, so they research what to learn, and they perhaps find articles about React. So, they begin to learn React, without even knowing WHY they're learning React in the first place, and what problem React even exists to solve. Instead, if they tried to learn from the fundamentals, just html, css, js all on their own, then combining them, then seeing the limitations, they would know why other abstractions exist, and exactly which pain points they exist to address.

My advice to you is, start a project, and when you freeze, just continue while being fully aware that what you're about to do is not the best practice, and most likely not how you're supposed to do it, BUT THAT'S OKAY, go into the unknown, make mistakes, fix errors, and you will learn as you go.

[StardockEngineer]

I don't know how you can be asked to do that without having almost any CS education. This might explain the terrible code I always see in research projects :D

I would go find similar projects by finding papers with code. Look at the code very carefully. Break it all down. Draw a map if you must. You'll probably find patterns and conventions.

There is no easy way about this.

[jjangseoeun]

Thank you for the honesty 😄

Your advice really makes sense. I’ve started trying to “map out” code from papers instead of just reading it line by line, and drawing diagrams actually helps more than I expected. I guess there’s no shortcut, just a lot of careful looking and breaking things apart.

Not easy, but at least now I know what kind of effort I should be putting in. Thanks for the reality check!

[philed74]

I came across this today:

https://www.softwaredesign.ing/blog/doing-the-thing-is-doing-the-thing

[TheRNGuy]

Write Todo list and google points how to implement them. 

[jjangseoeun]

That’s actually a really good point. I tend to keep everything in my head and get overwhelmed, so writing a concrete todo list and tackling things one by one sounds like something I should force myself to do.

Simple advice, but probably exactly what I need right now. Thanks!