My First Time… Coding That Is!
Okay, so the title might be a little misleading, but I promise, this is about my journey into coding. It all started with a project I desperately needed to automate. Manual work was killing me, and I knew there had to be a better way.
I remember staring blankly at my screen, overwhelmed. Where do I even begin? I Googled “easiest programming language for beginners” and Python kept popping up. So, Python it was.
First, I installed Python. Sounds easy, right? But I stumbled through the installation process, clicking everything without really reading. Ended up with a weird path configuration that took me a solid hour to fix. Lesson learned: read the instructions!
Next up: learning the basics. I started with a free online course. The instructor was okay, but the examples were boring as hell. Printing “Hello, world!” a million times didn’t exactly set my soul on fire.
I quickly realized I needed a real project. Something that actually mattered to me. That’s when I decided to automate a tedious data cleaning task I had at work.
I started small. I wanted to read a CSV file, filter some rows, and write the results to a new file. Seemed simple enough, right? Wrong! I spent hours wrestling with file paths, encoding errors, and weird CSV formatting issues.
Here’s a breakdown of what I did:
- Installed the
pandaslibrary (pip install pandas– this took me way too long to figure out). - Tried to read my CSV file:
df = *_csv("my_*")– immediately ran into an encoding error. - Googled “pandas read_csv encoding error” – discovered I needed to specify the encoding:
df = *_csv("my_*", encoding="latin-1")– Success! (For now…) - Filtered the data:
filtered_df = df[df["column_name"] == "some_value"]– this actually worked on the first try! (Beginner’s luck, probably). - Wrote the filtered data to a new CSV file:
filtered_*_csv("filtered_*", index=False)– more encoding errors! - More Googling, more trial and error. Finally, I got it working with
encoding="utf-8".
It was a frustrating process, but I learned so much. I learned how to read error messages (most of the time), how to use Google effectively, and how to ask for help on Stack Overflow without getting roasted.
The best part? When I finally got the script working, it felt amazing. I ran it, and in seconds, it did what used to take me hours. It was pure magic.
I’m still a beginner, but I’m hooked. I’m already planning my next project. And who knows, maybe one day I’ll actually be able to write code without spending half my time on Google. But for now, I’m just enjoying the ride.
