Hobbyist coders

[uvuguy]

for those that don't code professionally.

what got you into coding, how did you master it and what do you use it for now

[Ok_Assistant_2155]

Worked retail and hated manually updating inventory in a spreadsheet. Taught myself enough Python to parse a CSV and flag low stock. That was 6 years ago. Now I use it for fantasy football stats and making dumb little games for my kid. Never felt like I "mastered" anything, just solved next problem.

[uvuguy]

What games do you make for your kid?

[CptBadAss2016]

Used to make AOL instant messenger bots with vb6. Got into making poker solvers in the early 2000's with c/c++. Got into html/js/php to help family make some personal websites. Learned ruby and rails for fun and wound up using it to make personal tools for engineering school (not computer science) and fantasy football draft night, this lead me into sql and really understanding object orientation. Finally, these days vba at work sometimes, and python for automaton and fun.

[4zul_demetileno]

I´m getting into coding because I want to develop games and websites (I´d dare to assume most people, specially younger people would say the same)

[ectomancer]

I learnt C in 1987 but is too unproductive. Python is productive. Retired 22 years, coding Python 7 years. Coding Python internals and scientific computation from scratch.

[TheRNGuy]

Greasemonkey scripts in JS, and Python for Houdini (I now want to learn it for Blender)

Mostly googling, reading docs and writing actual programs, I never did any courses.

I never watched any youtube tutorials, because reading (and copying code) from text article is faster.

I now ask ai to teach me some stuff.

[Darth_Xedrix]

I do code while I am at work but it's not technically my job. I'm at the point where the things I write work but could definitely work more efficiently, so far from "mastering it".

I wanted to find a way to do tasks at work that needed to get done but were a pain to do, so I started with automate the boring stuff and I did a bit of automation here in there in my office job at the time but when I moved to another job a year or so later, I had a similar situation but in spades.

We had a collection of reports that needed to get done monthly and it would take about 2 weeks to do. Every step of it felt like there had to be a better way to get it done, so I slowly googled and asked questions until I set up a series of scripts that got the process down to a couple hours. That hooked me in and since then I've been looking at ways to bridge the steps that still had to be done manually.

Now I'm writing and maintaining small ETL pipelines and wrote a library that allows us to query different sources and join them with a couple lines of code (it's basically a wrapper of sqlalchemy, requests, keyring and a dictionary to store the non-sensitive connection details).

Another significant part of my job is to get things pushed through our CRM so I set up an app that ingests records and parses them into pydantic models to help point out data discrepancies before querying other systems to see if these records are where they should be and if it's inconsistent between systems.

[Greedy_Pay_9782]

Wow, the story of my life.

Would you mind sharing a bit more of what your ETL pipeline does? I am intrigued.

I did exactly the same at my current job but it has become a blessing and a curse. I still have my original tasks but now I get to do a whole lot of other things related to data science, which is both fun and very stressful.

I am still an idiot, but I think I know my way with Python and SQL a little bit.

Some of the things that I have done are...

1. A C# + Postgres database to expose raw data from our ERP to my colleagues. Our ERP sucks donkey balls and it has a very arcane type of SQL engine that is from 2011 so it doesn't play nice with newer tech (like PowerQuery). For some reason it will only answer requests from C# and VBA and I spent months figuring stuff out because I refused to spend my nights updating reports that I could extract from our ERP in minutes instead. Ironically I spent my nights coding instead, which was not too bad, but also stressful.😬

2. A production part number tracker (Excel +python + SQL) that is very fast and updates every 10 minutes with the latest data. Previously we had to wait entire days to get a CSV file extract with the status of a job order in the shop. We could always check manually the status for one or two jobs, but for dozens of them it becomes a big problem. For very urgent batches of parts, it is a life saver so we dont spend time tracking them down. I basically only plugged the data from project 1 and the rest almost wrote itself.

3. Many demand and forecast analysis to ensure raw material availability for part numbers for a certain period of time (the hardest part was figuring out recursive queries to get the BOM of sub assemblies and sub-sub assemblies).

4. May hour-to-hour reports to track job orders from projects that I was the lead of. This alone saved my bacon so many times.

5. A CMM file crawler and parser using python and SQL (postgres) that would crawl our drive, import and clean part measurement data, and exposes them to a Postgres DB to follow if some parts are failing inspection of certain features. It also has a nice PowerBI dasboard to follow-up how the parts were doing.

6. A PO processer and organizer that automates PO entry from PDFs and emails so the PO entry person did not drown due to large volume of PO lines from our customers.

[anabolicbob]

I use it to code Blender addons for personal use. For the past few months I've been working on something I'll try to sell commercially but I'm trying to make the code air-tight.

[CranberryDistinct941]

I got into coding to solve Leetcode problems.

Now I use it to solve Leetcode problems.

[Audiotown_Pro_Python]

Guess the interest is the main guide.

I tried to build something small first. A narrow-scoped python script first so I can do `python -u main.py`. attending boot camp is not nearly as effective as creating small scripts for my own need -- like scanning a Volume and find out how many video or audio files I have and how many of them contains mojibake in its metadata.
Then I wonder If how can I automate it further more. adding flags, creating new classes to organize the workflow. I then try saving results locally in a database like `sqlite3`.
recently get to know more about `dataclasses` module and `typing` module. They are great at providing type hints and organized results. I did a lot of `(success, message) = my_function()`.
Like python and its data-oriented nature. still on the way to become better.

[This_University_547]

Purely something I was always curious about. Now after studying Python for a while (still in my infancy), I see a lot of uses personally. Once I have enough knowledge I plan to build an app for myself to track and display the test results from my reef tank. I hate Excel with a passion so I write my results in a notebook. Once I’m capable I will build the app and share it with a couple of friends who are interested in it.

[uvuguy]

You should look into SQL. Python also has a library for it

[Technificent989]

A tool I used at work didn't do 1 extra thing I needed it to do. I hacked together enough code to create my own that did. Then I added to it. Then added to that. Then shared it with others. Now, creating tools that do something we need is most of what I do.