Lists represent one of the most used data structures in any Python script. One of the reasons why I like programming in Python is that I get to reach a result quite quickly.
One such thing is the opportunity to easily and quite simply access their elements quite flexibly.
With flexibility, I mean, having the opportunity to choose only the elements that we want.
You are usually asked to get the largest or smallest element in a list, but it can also be the case that you are asked to also find more than just a single element, namely, a number of elements that are the largest, or the smallest in that list.
Strings are pretty common in our day-to-day programming lives. One common task that we may need to do is perform a switch from one case to another one.
Of course, it’s not supposed to be a standalone task in Jira. Rather, it can be just a tiny portion of a larger task.
Since your time is valuable and you can invest it in more useful things, it is worth knowing that you can do such switches quickly in Python with built-in functions without having you do any implementation.
A software bug in a Therac-25 radiation therapy machine caused the death of five patients after receiving a massive dose of X-rays.
Knight Capital lost half a billion dollars in half an hour when a software bug allowed computers to sell and buy millions of shares with no human oversight.
These and many other stories tell how seemingly unimportant bugs can actually cause so many tragic disasters.
Software is becoming more and more important and that doesn’t seem to stop any time soon.
At the same time, this comes with the increased responsibility for programmers who are supposed to be very careful and really good at what they do.
Not programmers who only spent 1 night learning a few lines of code from a book and have cold emailed hundreds of recruiters asking for a job.
Wait, is it really possible to learn programming in just 1 night?
As funny as it sounds, there was a similar question asked on Quora more than 5 years ago.
Unfortunately, I cannot find that exact question anymore, but it stuck in my memory since then.
Maybe, the person who made the question was trolling, or had an exam the next day and was hoping to get encouraging answers to pull an all-nighter and study before the exam.
I don’t remember the other answers, but I read one answer in there, which was really wise.
The answer was something along the lines:
Take a laptop and go to the north pole. A night there lasts 6 months. That’s how you can increase your chances of learning programming.
We live in this time where we want everything in a matter of seconds.
We want fast food, fast cars, six-pack abs in 6 days, etc.
That’s the mindset that we have most of the time and we expect the same thing to be in other areas as well.
However, the real mastery comes from a lot of work and dedication.
You have Peter Norvig, the director of research at Google suggesting you to learn to program in 10 years because rushing isn’t going to be worth it:
“In 24 hours you won’t have time to write several significant programs, and learn from your successes and failures with them. You won’t have time to work with an experienced programmer and understand what it is like to live in a C++ environment. In short, you won’t have time to learn much. So the book can only be talking about a superficial familiarity, not a deep understanding. As Alexander Pope said, a little learning is a dangerous thing.”
If you mention that to people, they may not like it, but that’s the actual reality.
You cannot just jump from printing a few “Hello World” statements in the console and expect to build the next Google the other day.
I am not denying the fact that you could implement a really nice application in a few hours, but that doesn’t come that fast.
There is a developer who has already implemented 10 applications in 10 hours in one sitting, but that’s not the result of one-night learning. He learned a lot until he managed to pull that off.
It takes time to learn something really well.
The more you do something, the more likely you are at getting better at it, which results in an improvement of your performance, and the cycle repeats.
Now that you have read that, do not get too overwhelmed with the long journey ahead of you though.
“You don’t set out to build a wall. You don’t say ‘I’m going to build the biggest, baddest, greatest wall that’s ever been built.’ You don’t start there. You say, ‘I’m going to lay this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid.’ You do that every single day. And soon you have a wall.”
Now, instead of asking yourself whether you can learn programming in 1 night, a better question would be:
What is one small but valuable thing that I could learn tonight?
There are many people out there who have started some types of businesses, affiliate links in blog posts, online courses, or books that do not require any maintenance or any type of work and still bring them money.
This is also known as passive income.
There are also people who are increasing their passive income while talking about ways they have built their passive income. People who go and make courses, or write books: Here is how I built up a 6 figure businessand similar titles that you may have probably stumbled upon so far.
If you are reading this, chances are that you use GitHub on a regular basis.
Maybe that’s because you need to create new repositories for your personal side projects, or simply because you have to push your latest changes in a work project.
I am an experienced and passionate Senior Software Engineer with a demonstrated history of working in the full life cycle of software development with enormous curiosity for data science, machine learning, algorithms, data structures, and solving challenging problems. I am an open-source enthusiast at https://github.com/fatosmorina and also a writer.
I am open for new opportunities.