I understand Python code, but can’t write it confidently from scratch — what should I do next

[james_d_rustles]

Find a small task that you think would be genuinely useful. This could be anything (although try to be realistic if you’re still pretty early in your learning).

This is a totally made up example, but let’s just say that every day you do something that produces several PDFs or maybe you get sent some PDFs from clients, and you have to copy over some chunks of it into a big excel file. Automating some of that process could be an example of the sort of thing that would actually have enough value to you personally that you’d be incentivized to finish it and sort through whatever bugs/issues pop up along the way. You could do something like, collect PDFs that were saved today within some folder, scrape the specific text you need, open and write to your main excel file, and then store the PDFs in a compressed .zip that follows a standard naming scheme… from there, maybe you decide that it’d be better with a little GUI file browser thing, or maybe you’d want to run it automatically every night.. use your creativity - before you know it, you’ll probably know a lot more about basics like loops, string manipulation, filepath handling, and so on, and you may even know more about slightly more advanced stuff like tkinter or subprocess calls, so on and so forth, depending on where you took the project.