Why I want you to learn Python? Hi, there welcome to the world of programming. I hope you are safe and healthy. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, most of you are probably working from home. As a working professional, I know it is hard to maintain a balance between work and family.

Do you know you can save a lot of time by automating some or all of your repetitive tasks?

All you need to do is instruct your computer to do the work for you. That is what computer programming is.

I know most of you might not know how to write a program and let it help you in your daily workflow. The answer to this question is quite simple actually learn python programming.

What is Python?

Well earlier in this blog post, I told you what programming is and how most of you might not know it, Well this where python can help you.

Python is a programming language. You can instruct your computer to do your daily repetitive tasks using python. Python is a free and open-source programming language which means a ton of people who are out there on the internet to help you.

In this blog, I am not going to teach you Python, because there are a ton of great tutorials out there to help you get started with python. I will link some of my favorites down below for you guys to checkout.

Why Learn Python? Not Any other language

Some of you might be good with other tools like Microsoft Excel, Notepad++, etc for carrying out repetitive tasks but this software has their own limitations and again they are not free to use, unlike Python.

1. Easy to Learn and Code

The reason I am recommending python because it is very easy to learn even for non-technical people. Python is as easy as writing English.

Let’s say you and your buddy wants to decide something over a Rock-Paper-Scissor game. But you both are lazy like me, so you have decided to let a computer program do it for you. Again Hypothetical but let’s consider the scenario.

here’s how you can do it.

So In Just four lines of human readable code you have created a rock paper scissor game.

2. Free and Open Source

Most of the People and companies choose python because it is free to use and open source meaning people are continuously making it better and better.

Python is maintained by Python Software Foundation. You can visit their website and learn more about them.

Being open-source is written in C language which is a bit harder to understand syntax wise than that of Python. Python is evolving continuously every day. May be one day you will be able to contribute to the python community too.

3. Community

There is always this thing with programming that no matter how experienced you are, you will always going to stuck at some problem. This is where community helps.

Python has the biggest and the most diverse community. So no matter on what problem you are stuck there will always be people on the internet, which will help you solve the problem.

List of Popular Python Communities:

1. PySlackers
2. Python Discord
3. Stackoverflow
4. r/Python Reddit

For the beginners these three reasons are enough, of-course there are several other advantages like:

• Python is dynamically typed.
• Strong and Several libraries for every need
• Python for Web development e.g Django framework
• Data analysis and Machine learning using Python

Now coming to the main topic of the blog.

How python helps me save 65% efforts?

The only reason I was emphasizing you to learn python is to tell you, How you can make use of python every day to save efforts while working on repetitive tasks. I will not go into exact details and code here but I will create separate blog posts for those.

1. Task Automation

I automate most of the tasks that I can. I automate copying pasting tasks from excel, webpages, downloads etc

Python is famous for automation. There are a lot of automation libraries available in python for us to use. When I say automation what kind of task you might ask, let us take examples.

Let say I have to copy and paste a piece structured information from a website on an hourly basis and as the hour goes by the information from the website changes. So not I need to do it accurately but also faster before it changes again.

I don’t like copying and pasting stuff. So what I do instead is write a script that will do it for me. Not only it will be fast enough but also accurate and will not be prone to human errors.

Once you write a script you can run in n number of times or even better you can schedule it to run on a given time. which comes on the second point.

To automate any task you need to first do it manually then if a human can do it use the same computer program also can in less or no time.

2. Task Scheduling

I schedule tasks like wishing my Facebook friends birthday, Sending emails, uploading videos, and posting on social media.

Let’s take a broader example, Lets say you have to mail an attachment which will be generated once a set of the task is executed by some other program. Not only you have to wait for that program to finish but also it will waste your precious time or maybe some of your plans.

So what you can do in this scenario is to write a script that can send the attachments once they are ready.

3. Custom Notification

I have written scripts for several events like detecting a amazon price drop.

I spend most of my day working on a computer screen on several tasks, I can not spend the whole day and check amazon (Just an example) if the product is in stock or the price is dropped. The same goes for stocks.

So I wrote a custom notification for me. The program runs in the background and tells me when the price on certain items dropped by a certain percentage.

You can do the same for cricket scores. This saves my effort on going to amazon everyday interesting right!

4. Bot Creation

I have created a bot for my social media accounts which do a lot of stuff me. for e.g. I can reach out to people and comments on their posts if they are using certain hashtags.

Simply send custom greeting messages to your followers just to increase your reach. I have also created a bot for monitoring Reddit and telegram discussions to gain more insights from the conversation going on there.

We as a human don’t get much of time to do all of the stuff. by creating bots we can at the end of the day just spend some time and capture the most important highlights of the day.

5. Programming

Last but not the list, I am a programmer my job is to write clean and efficient code. Python programming is part of my life. it is easy to write code.

once you learn python you will know:

• How easy it is to code in python.
• Deliver large scalable projects in no time.
• The analysis of data is easy.
• Automating boring stuff using python.
• Running machine learning models, etc.

Resources to learn Python

• Learn from
  1. https://pythonprogramming.net/
  2. https://www.learnpython.org/
  3. https://learncodethehardway.org/

• Practice from
  1. https://www.hackerrank.com/
  2. https://www.spoj.com/
  3. https://leetcode.com/

Thank You For reading 🙂