Operations analyst here. About a third of my week is just moving numbers between two systems that apparently will never talk to each other.

So yeah, I want to automate it.

I’m not trying to become a developer or switch careers at 38. I just want the four hour Tuesday task to become a script I run and then forget about.

I’ve got Boot dev, DataCamp and Automate the Boring Stuff on my list. But I’m having trouble figuring out which one actually makes sense for someone who wants to automate work tasks instead of learn coding for a new career.

What would you start with?

My first Python project: Postman Clone

I’ve been working on a small project called postman_clone to practice Python and learn more about how APIs and HTTP requests actually work.

I didn’t start with all these features at once. I started with the basics, then kept adding things as I learned. I worked with functions, conditions, user input, JSON, error handling, and HTTP requests, and little by little the project started becoming more complete.

Right now, my project can handle:

• GET
• POST
• PUT
• DELETE
• JSON request bodies
• An optional header
• An optional query parameter
• Basic error handling for requests and JSON

There’s still a lot I want to improve. I want to make the code cleaner, add support for multiple headers and query parameters, improve the error handling, and make the whole thing feel more like an actual API testing tool.

I’m still learning, so I’m posting the code here to get some feedback from people who have more experience with Python.

If you see something I could improve, or if there’s something you think I should add next, I’d really appreciate the advice 🙌

This is still a work in progress, but I’m happy with how far I’ve gotten so far.

Hi. Anyone who can share any repositories online or resources that I can learn python? I have a background on it (predictive analysis in OR) but I'm more interesting on applying in automating my tasks at work.

To give you some background, I have a BCA degree and previously worked as a Junior Technical Support Engineer for 2.5 years, followed by about 2.5 years as a US IT Recruiter. I recently had to take a career break due to a family medical emergency, but I am now ready to get back into the tech industry. I’ve been researching different fields, but the rapid advancements in AI have left me a bit overwhelmed about which direction to take. I’m looking for a resilient, future-proof career path. Initially, I looked into Java, but it seems like a massive time investment to master right now. I am currently leaning toward learning Python and moving into Data Science, or potentially just diving straight into a Data Science roadmap. For those already in the industry, do you think this is a safe, long-term choice? I would also deeply appreciate any recommendations for courses or structured learning paths!

"Python Concurrency with asyncio" by Matthew Fowler is gold, because it explains not only "what" but also "why" and asyncio evolution over years, so with this knowledge I can look at any tutorial or AI slop and immediately determine if it's worth looking at or still relies on manual loop management etc. However, it was published in 2022 in times of Python 3.10 and no 2nd edition in sight. asyncio has evolved even further since then, with TaskGroups, timeouts, except* etc. Anything recent on circa same depth level as that book?

i am a begginer in python i wanna do some projects what u guess for me ?

I am an AIML student currently in my 3rd year and want to know that for my placement preparation should I proceed with doing DSA in python or should I change my language to Java/C++

I am learning Python for ML (machine learning). What kind of projects would you recommend to reinforce my knowledge?

Day 6/100: Maze solver in Reeborg's World. Solved 3/4 test cases but hit an infinite loop on the 4th. Frustrated but didn't quit. Will retry tomorrow or move forward. Feeling the difficulty ramp but pushing through. It took me 5 hours literally will show up tomorrow to push through again any suggestions will be appreciated

CLint need a list of 40,000+ members from the ACR directory. Need Name, City, State, Zip, Specialty, Email, and Phone.
The directory/search results give me some of this information, but email, phone, address, Member Since, etc. appear to be available only on the individual member profile.

So I'm trying to figure out the best way to approach this in Python.

If I literally open/request every profile, that's 43k+ profile requests, which obviously makes me concerned about rate limits, blocking, or getting the account/IP banned.

I'm considering Python requests/BeautifulSoup or Playwright, but before attempting something this large I'd like some advice.

I am working through Automate the Boring Stuff on chapter 12. I have written the Clipboard Recorded program as instructed from the book, but the pyperclip.paste() function does not populate content from the clipboard. When I run the application, it only shows content that I put into the pyperclip.copy() function from another terminal, but nothing from using CTRL+C or right-click and choosing copy.

import pyperclip, time
pyperclip.set_clipboard('xclip')
print('Recording clipboard... (Ctrl-C to stop)')
previous_content = ''
try:
       while True:
               content = pyperclip.paste()     # Get clipboard contents.

               if content != previous_content:
                       # If it's different from the previous, print it:
                       print(content)
                       previous_content = content

               time.sleep(0.01)        # Pause to avoid hogging the CPU.
except KeyboardInterrupt:
       pass

I added the pyperclip.set_clipboard('xclip') line myself as an attempt to get this to work, but it still doesn't.

When I run something like the following from the interpreter, I get similar results. The paste function will output any string that was passed to the copy function, but it will not output anything from using CTRL+C.

Xclip is installed. I'm running Debian 13 with KDE Plasma 6.3.6.

Edit to add: I can call pyperclip.copy() from the interpreter and then paste using CTRL-V to another application. I have also tried using xsel instead with similar results.

Final Edit: I resolved it. Apparently I'm using Wayland and needed to install wl-clipboard. I need to study up on my different display servers for Linux.

Thank you.

I have a Master’s in Data Science with a previous background in wet-lab biology. My programming experience mainly came through my MSc, so I don’t have a traditional CS background.
At this point, I can usually **understand Python code when I see it**, explain what it is doing, and modify parts of it. But if you give me a problem and ask me to write the solution from scratch, I struggle — and I often rely on ChatGPT to get started.
I’m trying to figure out what the right way to overcome this is.
Should I:
go back and systematically learn Python/CS fundamentals through tutorials first, then start projects?
or keep building bioinformatics projects and use ChatGPT as a tutor/coding assistant while gradually becoming more independent?
I find learning programming purely through tutorials quite difficult and passive, especially because I’ve never studied CS formally.
**For people who came into bioinformatics from biology rather than CS: how did you actually learn to code independently? What should I be able to do before I consider myself “good enough” at Python for a junior bioinformatics role?**

so I wrote a python program years ago in school, and I was wondering if anyone on here could take a look at it for me. I'd like to improve it so that it brings you back to the start or the previous choice with an option to return to the start, but I don't remember anything because it's been years since I touched python. Feel free to play the game and get a feel for it.

Anyone have a fix or advice to fix it? I'll link the code here so that y'all can try it out yourselves (eventually I want to port this game to Nintendo DS).

We have secretaries creating reservations in a SAP form. Those reservations get exported as CSV files into some shared directory each VM has to mount. Then a cronjob fires an automated python script that drops all the tables in the application, and shoves the data from the CSV into those rows.

The form fields in the SAP forms don't match the CSV row fields. The CSV row fields don't match the applications MySQL schema in type or name. Properties such as datetime, address, client, guests, room_number etc are split across 8-12 CSV files so you have to load all of them into memory and perform black magic to construct a proper reservation object.

No unique IDs are given (so I have to fingerprint based on time, client, address etc), dates are in non-standard string format, 50% of the data is redundant and even the damn encoding is not utf8.

It's been a week or two that I have been working on this and Its driving me crazy. The schema is so complex that it takes a good hour just to load up this convoluted mess into my mental RAM so I can start working on it at the start of the day.

I assume if I were a full-time ETL/PowerBI guy I'd already finish this nightmare but I'm a devops/fullstack guy. I need some guidance on how to think about this problem in an abstract sense (i.e how to organize garbage data) so I can handle it effectively.

As the title asks, what differences (if any) do you get from an AI output vs human input. I would imagine that with most high effort AI models now they write purely pythonic code if a prompt is well written.

If you also use python in your job, how often do you use AI to write or plan your code and applications as a whole?

my goal is to create an army manager for the tabletop game mythras, where each soldier has their own hp, attack value, etc, that i can use to add detail to the large scale battles. i want to be able to direct commands to it (eg, 'damage 3 soldiers') and have it randomly determine which soldier is attacked, how much damage it does, and whether it kills them (as well as how it heals up, following the standard healing rules). I don't have a lot at the moment at all, just a dictionary that contains a nested dictionary for each soldier's hp and attack value, randomly determined:

from random import randint

Soldier1 = {
  "HP" : randint(1,10),
  "ATK" : randint(1,10),
}
Soldier2 = {
  "HP" : randint(1,10),
  "ATK" : randint(1,10),
}
Soldier3 = {
  "HP" : randint(1,10),
  "ATK" : randint(1,10),
}

myArmy = {
  "Soldier 1" : Soldier1,
  "Soldier 2" : Soldier2,
  "Soldier 3" : Soldier3
}

print(myArmy)
from random import randint

Soldier1 = {
  "HP" : randint(1,10),
  "ATK" : randint(1,10),
}
Soldier2 = {
  "HP" : randint(1,10),
  "ATK" : randint(1,10),
}
Soldier3 = {
  "HP" : randint(1,10),
  "ATK" : randint(1,10),
}

myArmy = {
  "Soldier 1" : Soldier1,
  "Soldier 2" : Soldier2,
  "Soldier 3" : Soldier3
}

print(myArmy)

now, that works fine for the three soldiers listed there, but i don't need 3 soldiers, i need 300. how can i input a number and have it create that many soldiers on the fly?

and, further to that, are dictionaries the best choice for this? i know the technical difference between dictionaries and classes, but i don't have any real-world context to either to know which is best for what i need.

someone know where can i learn this with cero python experience?

I'm a 3D artist, and our company will soon be in need of techincal artist, basically artists that can help to code functions and tools for our game. (As an example, lets say you need rain drops to fall on a window, but then animate and be affected by the wind. Stuff like that, a mix of visual and tecnhical things.)

They are willing to give us time and to sponsor us in order to educate ourselves, so I'm now looking for a course that I could do maybe one day a week in order to learn how to code with Python, possibly with a focus on game making/tools.

Prior to this I have had a one month course in Python during University, but a lot of that has slipped my mind by now. I have some understanding of how things function, but forgot all about how to write the code basically.

Do you have any good recommendations? I've obviously seen some stuff like boot.dev, and I think the format of being able to log in and follow a course whenever I have time would be ideal, but are sites like that actually any good? Eitherway, any recommendations would be appreciated :)

I have a month to learn Python (really, I have until the second week of October, but I want to be done sooner and not go down to the wire). I'm currently using freecodecamp.org but feel my progress is slower than I'd like. Does anyone have a recommendation to learn Python quickly? I'm loving what I've learned thus far. I start doing another job for the company I'm learning Python for in a week, so I want to cram as much into this week as possible to make things easier on the remaining time I have. Thank you all.

Hey everyone! im looking for a smaller, active developer community, it could be discord, a forum, or a small group, or anything that prioritizes depth over breadth. I wanna learn with a human feedback aside from the usual llms

im actually a beginner, although not a complete beginner. I have a handful of projects, and some very intermediate ones too! I'm still in the watching tutorials abt python phase and is still am completing the course of Asabeneh / 30-Days-Of-Python. From that, I want a place where I can get real human code reviews, discuss software architecture, and get honest critique on anti-patterns or mistakes.

If you're part of a tight-knit group that focuses on code craft and mentorship, I’d love to have a recommendation. Sank you so much besto friendo!

I’m in week 6 of an intro Python course and trying to use AI without skipping the learning part.

A small example is a function to flatten nested lists. My loop handled one level and broke on deeper nesting. I asked an AI for a hint and it returned a recursive version using “yield from” that passed the tests. It ran, and I realized I didn’t understand the recursion flow.

Right now I spend about 20 minutes solo with print tracing and a failing test, then about 5 minutes skimming docs on the specific concept like itertools, recursion, or list methods. I make one more attempt on my own. If I’m still stuck, I ask for a nudge. I keep a notes doc with short blurbs in my own words next to tiny practice snippets. Sometimes I generate an explanation in beyz coding assistant to compare with my notes, then go back to my code and implement it again from memory.

Lately I’ve been writing a tiny variant after I solve it. For flatten, I wrote a version that counts depth to check if I got the idea.

What habits keep AI from doing the thinking for you while still helping you move forward?

I just got my CCNA a while ago since I'm trying to get into networking and since I know scripting will be important, I wanted to learn Python but was wondering if anyone had any recommendations for free courses that would be good for someone trying to get into networking. I saw Cisco Networking Academy has Python Essentials 1 for free and was wondering what your thoughts are of that course or if there's something better on YouTube. I also started reading the book Mastering Python Networking Fourth Edition by Eric Chou.

Hello im a newbie in. tech world and had applied to per scholars where i had to do tech prep before the interview. I'm done with class but is it mandatory to take the exam or not? Or do i just complete the free course.