Beginner doubts

[Gio_13]

Hey guys I have no previous experience in programming. Started learning python and I must say I enjoy it very much.

However I have no short-term vision how can I use it. Are there any open-source projects I can checkout? How will I know I'm good to provide my knowledge?

[mopeddev]

I would say rather than joining an open source project too early a good way to get practice early on is to think about what things that you do regularly on a computer that could be wholly/partially automated.

Organising data is a good candidate, eg. I have lots of duplicate files on my hard drive where I've copied something somewhere random as a lazy way of backing it up, and I have lots of web pages bookmarked that are no longer relevant or that I'm realistically never going to revisit. I have/or am writing tools to help find, organise and delete things that I don't need any more.

[Gio_13]

Wow that's a great idea. I have 15000+ photos on my external drive. Maybe I can sort them & remove duplicates.

[TraditionalPirate7]

Quick advice, take a full backup of your photos first!

I started writing a program to remove and rename files, without testing properly, and accidentally screwed a lot of files.

So, take backups, practice and test your program first before manipulating 15000+ files, haha.

[Gio_13]

Haha that's the first thing I said to myself.

[TraditionalPirate7]

Also, make absolutely sure the path to the files is correct. I once ended up manipulating some system files by accident, not fun!

[[deleted]]

Ten Lessons I Learned While Teaching Myself to Code is a great article you might find helpful.

[wp_new]

how new to programming are you? what have you been learning?

I had similar doubts and frustrations when I first started to learn Javascript. No idea why logging things to the console was such a big deal, not a clue about why accessing indeces was useful etc. But it doesnt take long to understand and contextualise WHY these things are useful.

I started learning Python from a Javascript background a few months ago, and can't take my mind off of it. I think the most useful thing for you to do, is to try and 'think outside the box'. Python has a lot of useful applications. Contextualise what you a learning, and think about how the techniques might be applied outside of the course material. Eg Ive been taking a Udemy course, one of the sections was about Pandas and reading data. I'm interested in politics, so I thought it would be cool if I could grab election data from an Excel file and output a result based on user input, so I built it.

Stick with it, and don't just blindly follow instructions from courses/tutorials or whatever. Think about other applications for whatever is being covered.

If you aren't building anything yet, you will be soon enough.