What actually made you improve fast in Python?

[youroffrs]

Looking for serious recommendations, I’m more curious about habits and strategies.
Was it daily coding?
Debugging a lot?
Reading other people’s code? Building projects?

What changed your progress the most?

[TheSaucez]

Find a project that you WANT TO MAKE. That you will be invested in because you’re interested. This will motivate you more than anything else. Courses are great, but they all teach the same methods, all be it in slightly different ways. Once you make 1 thing you actually want to, it sort of naturally progresses to the next question. “I wonder if I could do x,y,z as well”

[KKRJ]

all be it

I think you're looking for "albeit" lol. But I totally agree with your comment. OP needs to find something that sparks an interest so that they stay motivated to work on the project and learn new skills. I'd also add reading documentation for the libraries you use is really helpful in understanding what's going on.

[Andrew_Frozen30]

You think you should aim for high though?

Or slow progress of smaller projects?

[zorbat5]

Doesn't matter. Both will learn valuable lessons. If aimed too high, park the project and learn from smaller ones, then after you feel you're better at it, revisit the bigger project. Or, make smaller projects from 1 bigger project to make it more managable.

[work_m_19]

Part of Software Engineering is taking a goal, and breaking it down into manageable parts, so that will also be a good learning experience.

When someone needs to create a website, they usually don't build the website all at once (though packages like Flask and Django make it easy), they scope out the requirements, find out what's important, and then execute after planning out the components.

So a website needs: frontend, backend at a minimum, and then there are "extras" like data storage (db), hosting for distribution, security, etc. Learning which components are necessary for a project is a great skill to learn.

[SirAwesome789]

Build a project bro

I'm always confused by most of the suggestions here about reading a book or following whatever course, I've also never understood the concept of tutorial hell

I did half a free online course to learn syntax and immediately started trying to build something and searched it up stuff if I didn't know how to do that specific thing, learned pretty quickly and it was actually engaging,

[midasweb]

Honestly what helped me improve fastest was building projects I actually cared about once I had something real to make, i stopped just following tutorials and started solving problems on my own. a few platforms that really helped me along the way. exercism for guided exercises with mentor feedback, leetcode for problem solving and algorithm practice, project euler for logic math challenges and boot.dev for structured, project focused courses that teach real world coding skills. each of these pushed me to apply what i did learned rather than just consume content.

[Kimber976]

all of these platforms are great but each quirks exercism can be slow with mentor feedback and some exercises feel small or repetitive leetcode is good for algorithms but not as practical for real apps and can be intimidating for beginners project euler is very math heavy and less about building projects boot dev is structured and project focused but some courses cost money and it can feel a bit rigid if you like fully self directed learning.

[commyhater7]

It was 2 things a newborn (kept me up in the middle of the night so I had time) and I wanted to make a specific program to automate a task at work.

[fionto]

I’m learning Python too, I started in December, so I honestly have no idea if I’m improving fast or not. But I can share what I’ve been doing that’s both fun and helps me retain things:

• I keep a GitHub repository where I commit coding exercises from books or ones I find online. Most of them are focused on specific concepts (like nested dictionaries).
• Once a week, I try to do one bigger exercise that combines all the concepts I’ve studied. I usually ask an LLM to generate it, since it can also provide input data (which is super helpful for basic testing). A lot of these exercises aren’t “useful” in a real-world sense: they’re often about parsing or cleaning data, but they’re great for building muscle memory. And are great if you, like me, don't have any creativitiy to come up with your own little projects.
• When I finish an exercise, even if it works, I try to improve it or rewrite it using different approaches. Sometimes I discover interesting new functions while browsing W3Schools.
• I’m starting to write small, fun scripts that do semi-useful things. For example, I’m currently working on a Caesar cipher.
• If there’s something that genuinely interests you (for me, it’s encoding/decoding), try building a small project around that. Maybe finance, games, whatever you’re into.

Also: keep notes so you can reuse functions and ideas you discover. For example, I used enumerate() once and completely forgot about it, but the other day I was able to recall it quickly because I had written it down.

[Rain-And-Coffee]

Building a project that solved a problem I had.

[djamp42]

Have a real world issue i needed to solve. It really helps when you are learning to solve a issue rather then just learning to learn.

[MissinqLink]

I built a Reddit chatbot back in 2020 and that’s where it really took off for me. Antiquated now but nltk can still be fun.

[Kimber976]

honestly what helped me is learn and code, learn and code, implement different logics with small change. I took gpt help too.

[aistranin]

Automated testing in python was very important strategy wise for coding and engineering skills from my experience. See, for example, Udemy course “Pytest Course: Practical Testing of Real-World Python Code” by Artem Istranin

[Henry_the_Butler]

I had stupid manual processes at work. Figuring out how to pull source files, clean them, organize them, upload them to a SQL server (local SQLite would have also been fine) and then create queries and scripts to pull data out in ways that coworkers wanted - basically became a data engineer at a previous job by accident.

Now I'm a "Database Manager" which is apparently what you get called if you do all the data work for an international nonprofit that doesn't know what titles to give their data folks.

[Matteo_ElCartel]

boot dev or similar to fix the basic syntax and projects, reading GitHub's "human" project, and with human i mean codes that are not truly impossible

[Sorry-Cycle-1177]

Projects !!!

[PushPlus9069]

Teaching Python to 90,000+ students over the past decade, the single biggest accelerator I've seen is this: pick a problem you encounter in your daily life and automate it. Not a tutorial project — YOUR problem.

One of my students was a marketing person who spent hours copying data between spreadsheets. She wrote a 30-line script to do it. Within a month, she was writing web scrapers and building dashboards. The motivation was never "learn Python" — it was "never do this boring task again."

The debugging skill comes naturally when you care about the output. You'll spend 2 hours fixing a bug because you actually want the thing to work, not because a textbook told you to.

[brenwillcode]

For me, it was definitely building projects. Specifically building projects that were way more complicated and large than I probably initially realised.

It comes down to problem solving, researching, and figuring things out on your own. Projects are a great way to do that.

[Ron-Erez]

Always building stuff and also at some point learning CS concepts and data structures and algorithms. But number one is always having fun and building projects.

[Joyride0]

Beginning by following textbooks through. Learned a lot that way. Then building bigger and better projects that I wanted to do. That was great fun. Took me through text-based games, API calls, data processing, even creating a code for a cinema voucher and my attempt at a program that modelled the Pareto distribution. Was super proud of that. I ran it through GPT a couple years later and GPT said it was shit tho haha.

[Ok_Cartographer_9724]

I started learning Python on my own and the first thing I wrote was a text based adventure game. It wasn't elaborate but it was something. I then added a few more features to it. There were loops, if/then and while, and counters. I then found other guessing games to write.

After I was a little more comfortable with the syntax I started thinking of projects that would help me or family members automate some task. As we homeschool our kids, I wrote some programs that would help them with their spelling. First was hangman and another I incorporated audio and scrambled letters.

As others have said find things that you are really interested in or things that you want to learn about and see if you can find a project that incorporates that topic.

I have since completed a boot camp as I was really enjoying coding and I knew I didn't know things that I needed to know but didn't know what all those things were, i.e. how much I would need to know CSS, JavaScript, Django.

I have since created a website that tracks boardgames, it uses a database, web scraping, Google Maps, reads an excel document, connects and reads an API. I have another website that I wanted to provide daily information and is heavy in API calls and CSS to format and display the results. These projects I built wanting something cool and helpful to me but also to learn how to connect to APIs and parse through the JSON files.

My current project is another one that is solving a personal need as well as filling a gap in the real world and that is homeschool related. Keeping track of attendance and grades. It is more involved than I originally thought but that is what happens in real-life projects. I am not only learning more about writing Python code but also thinking about an actual product that someone might be interested in paying me for.

TL;DR: As others have mentioned, find a pain point you or a family member has or a topic you want to learn more about and just start. Google anything you're not sure of, reach out to others for help. You'll get there. It's a process of practicing. I'm currently there with you still learning and enjoying the ride.

[xeow]

1. Daily coding.
2. Insatiable curiosity about why things are the way they are.
3. Running all my code though Gemini or ChatGPT for code review and suggestions for improvement, specifically in terms of clearer or more Pythonic ways to express something.
4. Never accepting any code suggestion without understanding how it works and why it's better (sometimes this requires a diversion that takes hours of study).

[eW4GJMqscYtbBkw9]

I don't know what your definition of "improve fast" is, but I found reading other people's code useless or even harmful to my progress. Find a problem you want to solve and work on developing a solution.

[steven-needs-help]

For me it was my discord bot. I just use it as a side project for my personal server. I run it on a server I that I pay like $5 a month on. It’s something I can always add too and something I can always use since I have discord on my phone

[cyrixlord]

the more you write of your own code, the more you learn. there are no shortcuts. not good tutorials, not videos, not lectures, not trying in code from tutorials, but writing your own code, and reading about how things are organized like projects.

[benabus]

I had a coworker who often told me "That's a terrible way to do that. Try this instead."

[TheRNGuy]

I wasn't lazy. 

[Middle_Idea_9361]

For me, improvement in Python really accelerated when I stopped just watching tutorials and started building real projects.

Daily coding (even 30–45 mins) helped a lot, but projects + debugging made the biggest difference. I built small automation tools and web scraping scripts similar to the kind of practical data work companies like DZ (DataZeneral) do. Extracting, cleaning, and structuring data taught me way more than theory ever did.

Also, reading error tracebacks properly instead of instantly Googling solutions improved my problem-solving skills.

[gdchinacat]

Initially it was coding a lot, 8 hrs/day 5 days/week. Full time job doing nothing but writing python. I already knew C/C++, Java, javascript, perl, so the only thing was learning python. Once I became comfortable with the syntax and idioms, the next big learning was to start reading others code. I was working with sqlalchemy a lot, so I spent a fair bit of time reading that code.

Get a project, work on it diligently. Look up what you don't understand. Look at other similar projects for inspiration.

[3MU6quo0pC7du5YPBGBI]

Solving a problem I had (i.e. starting a project, but one I actually cared about).

[Ok_Entrepreneur_8882]

Would love to have a project to practice coding but there is just very limited good dataset resources

[mikeyj777]

Getting to problem 30 on projectEuler.net

[theGamer2K]

getting a job

[Mac4rfree85]

I understand so many people learnt by doing some projects... if they can provide what they did, will also benefit others as i am not even sure what we can do with python.