ConquerProgramming

I'm Ronald Hayden, founder of Software University at Apple and now owner of Conquer Programming. I love teaching Python to new and experienced programmers.

[ConquerProgramming @ConquerProgram1]

New programmer: "My job is to just get something -- anything -- working!"

Experienced programmer: "My job is to get things working, run it a bunch of times to find problems, then deploy."

Elite programmer: "My job is to get the tests to succeed."

[ConquerProgramming @ConquerProgram1]

Very nice @PyBeeWare challenge coin for submitting updates to their documentation at #PyCon2019!

[ConquerProgramming @ConquerProgram1]

My first ever sprint at #pycon! In my previous job I couldn't do this -- starting with a project that caught my eye: @PyBeeWare (https://t.co/OzCAldh5aO).

As my first action, answered a guy's questions about what virtual environments are...

[ConquerProgramming @ConquerProgram1]

@chris1610 @BokehPlots Haven't looked at it, will check it out. The more solutions I know about, the more options I can give students. Thanks!

[ConquerProgramming @ConquerProgram1]

On my quest for the most intuitive charting solution for students (*not* matplotlib!) -- currently settling on @BokehPlots with Patrik Hlobil's
Pandas-Bokeh library to automate DataFrame plotting. Nice!

https://t.co/RMoLNwfBEO

[ConquerProgramming @ConquerProgram1]

Thanks! I’m not leaving until later next week, so I at least had a few days to work things out if the wallet wasn’t found.

[Fula @phra1979]

@ConquerProgram1 I hope you got home ok.

[ConquerProgramming @ConquerProgram1]

Stressful day at #pycon2019 — thief stole my jacket + wallet w/ID, cash, and credit cards. Had to start figuring out how to fly home without ID, when the wallet was found.

Thief took cash + jacket, dumped wallet.

Local & Pycon staff were very helpful.

[ConquerProgramming @ConquerProgram1]

Learned in a Jupyter tutorial at #pycon2019 today: You can paste code from StackOverflow and such with the interpreter syntax into Jupyter and it will run without modification:

>>> for word in "That's pretty cool".split():
... print(word)

[ConquerProgramming @ConquerProgram1]

I'm hoping that csv.DictReader will stop using OrderedDict now that it's redundant. Output like this makes it harder to explain dictionaries to students:

OrderedDict([('Employee ID', '2'), ('First Name', 'Aziz'), ('Last Name', 'Agarwal'), ('Attended Orientation', 'No')])

[ConquerProgramming @ConquerProgram1]

Just arrived in Cleveland to stay for 10 days for #PyCon2019. The conference last year had a big impact on me and helped change my career. Looking forward to this year!

[ConquerProgramming @ConquerProgram1]

Quiz: For my classes I developed this text file. Any guesses what is the result of the exercise?

[ConquerProgramming @ConquerProgram1]

It took me a long time to work up a really good explanation of Unicode, with all the details you needed to understand in Python 2. Revising it for Python 3 and I'm cutting out 80% of the material; you just don't need to know it anymore.

[ConquerProgramming @ConquerProgram1]

@ZoomerAnalytics Both the ability to put Python functionality inside an Excel doc and to do live updates on the doc. As an engineer I think in terms of pulling the data out and using it, but students/customers just want to push a button in Excel and see the results.

[ConquerProgramming @ConquerProgram1]

Researching various Excel/Python libraries. After trying OpenPyxl and Pandas, my current favorite is #xlwings for the dynamic connection to spreadsheets and ability to do inline features. This is what my customers are asking for.

[ConquerProgramming @ConquerProgram1]

@IsaacEstesJones Quality code is a matter of time and experience. Get it working, then be dedicated to learning how to get it working better. (If you don’t do the latter, you become a hack, alas...)

[ConquerProgramming @ConquerProgram1]

I used to joke in my #Python classes: "StackOverflow has shown that programmers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs. But space users also kick puppies."

Now I've given up because my code editors enforce spaces. I joke no more.

[ConquerProgramming @ConquerProgram1]

@justmarkham did a survey of Jupyter notebook cloud solutions -- something I'm seriously considering for teaching #Python classes. Kevin's work is always thorough and well-thought out, worth reading!

https://t.co/T3xvlNL9xk

[ConquerProgramming @ConquerProgram1]

@ChrisHoganIO @GamerGeekNews Automate the Boring Stuff with Python is a good start, written by @AlSweigart.

I will have new online classes starting in June (https://t.co/4Qk6P5JoCu).

[ConquerProgramming @ConquerProgram1]

The slogan for my 'helping' library is: "As my girlfriend's cat says when knocking over my drink: I'm HELPING!" Love the new logo done by https://t.co/7nPmQCWTP6 for the library:

[ConquerProgramming @ConquerProgram1]

@McCurdyColton I used to be confused about it, then I learned how scopes work in Python and everything became clear. I think I'll do a blog post on the topic...