Software engineering and personal development
You probably know a sort-of universal way of finding the sum of elements in a list is pretty much all programming languages out there:
Iterate through a list of elements and then keep on adding the value of that element to a variable in which you have initialized before the start of the iteration.
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One great way to save up time is to take from other people’s lessons and mistakes and not have to learn them yourself through the hard way.
This also includes learning about mistakes that one can make as a software developer.
This includes the mistake of trying to learn everything, or being intimidated by fear.
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With the new quick advancements of machine learning and AI in general, we are witness to an increasing challenge of keeping up with the pace as the field processes at a faster rate than we may be able to keep up with.
Add to this the fact that a new paper is usually built on top of other previously published work and they may not give you the details about it which you then also need to go and read for that particular paper.
This chain of papers that you need to look up to and understand before you understand a paper that you are just about to read is getting longer.
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In a previous post, we talked about ways of checking whether 2 strings are anagrams using Counter() from the collections module.
In this article, we are going to mention another way of checking whether 2 strings are anagrams using sorted() method.
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You move to a new city and you don’t know where the nearest grocery store is.
You don’t beat yourself up — it’s normal. You just use Google Maps to find it.
After you’ve been there several times, it’s highly likely that you won’t need to use Google Maps.
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Lists are part of typically every project that you work on these days. You have lists of people, a list of products, a list of activities, and the list of lists goes on.
There can be times when you want to only have unique elements in that list, for example, if someone has liked multiple posts and you want to get all the people who have liked one of your posts. You do not want to include that same person multiple times in that list.
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Checking whether a word is an anagram of another one can be a question that is quite common in coding interviews.
If you don’t know what an anagram is, here is a definition:
An anagram is a word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of a different word or phrase, typically using all the original letters exactly once. For example, the word anagram itself can be rearranged into nag a ram, also the word binary into brainy and the word adobe into abode.
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In real-world applications, you may need to compare two custom objects that you have defined.
Maybe you need to compare them based on certain criteria, or their certain attributes.
Let’s say you have a class called Game and you want to be able to compare games based on their scores.
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If you use Python in your work, or simply for scripting, chances are that there will come a point in time when you are going to need to work with dates.
It can be doing a conversion from one format to the other one, changing the timezone, etc.
Since you have already decided to read this article, then why don’t we stop wasting time talking and just start immediately learning?
Despite being engineers, we still spend a considerable amount of time using a natural language to talk.
Since that is the case, we can also convert a string looking like a natural phrase into a date as shown below:
In this example:
As we are mostly working remotely these days, we may have the chance to also work with someone who is in another timezone.
You can of course just Google and find out what time it is now in New York City even if you have never been before, but there is joy in implementing this yourself.
Let’s see how to do that.
Since we still live in this universe where time passes, we may need to find the number of days that have passed between one point and another one.
We can of course pull up a calendar and manually count the days, which is slow and boring.
To do that quickly, we can import the date module in our Python script and initially prepare the dates:
After that, we can basically just find the difference between 2 numbers:
Yes, it’s that simple.
You do not have to spend hours doing it manually on a physical calendar. It can take barely a few moments to do it like this.
Let us imagine that you are working on a feature of a product in which the subscription for a user expires 90 days from now. You want to save up that date in the database using the following:
You can also just change that to weeks, like the following:
Have you ever wanted to go back in time and improve something in your life, stayed more with your loved ones, or simply start investing in Bitcoin a little bit earlier?
Well, I wish I could tell you how to do that.
However, if you want to find a date in the past, let’s say 180 days from now, you can easily do that using the following:
As you may have guessed already, you can also find a date by subtracting weeks:
We can also find the difference between the 2 dates in months quite quickly.
We should keep in mind that we may have dates that are in different years, and it’s not enough to think that we can just subtract two months.
For example, between October 2018 and November 2021, there isn’t just a month difference. There is also a difference in years as well.
The majority of the world puts days in front of months in their dates:
However, there can be cases when you get as input a date where the month is in front of the day.
If you want to convert those dates in the format that the majority of the world uses, here is how:
In some companies, they pay their employees on the first day of every month.
If you want to know what day of the week will that be, then this snippet can be helpful:
That’s pretty much it. I hope you learned at least something in this article.
In the last article, I shared a simple way that you can use to find the first element in a list without using the index 0.
In case you haven’t read it and you do not want to read it now, here is a short recap that is also going to be helpful in this article.
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