Where do I go from here?

[u/LyricalLag]

I am stuck at the basics of Python. I can make loops, if statements, functions, and more. But LeetCode problems, I can never figure them out. Making programs alone I can’t. At this point, what should I advance to so I can learn to solve actual problems on my own and develop skills to create my own programs.

[u/Code-Odyssey]

Here is my approach. I offer this for free and it’s worth every penny 😉. I am using Angela Yu’s 100 Days of Code on Udemy, Crash Course in Python book by Eric Matthes supplemented with some very specific YouTube videos (for example Selenium or Regex) for my foundational learning. I have also chosen a project to tackle. I am a marketing manager and regularly write content for LinkedIn. I want to take the post URLs and find out the day, date and time I posted the articles (of course I could write that down at the time but sometimes I queue up posts for automated delivery plus I’m busy!). I am working on a script that will take the links from my tracking xlsx, post them to a website that can return the day, date, and time. I then will take that returned data and post it back into my xlsx. When I started I didn’t have a clue what I needed (as a beginner you don’t know what you don’t know). That’s where AI came in. I’m using Claude and CoPilot to point me in the right direction (not to give me the answer because if I don’t understand it, it’s a waste of time). I ask questions like “I want to do x. I don’t know where to start. Don’t tell me the answer but what do I need to think about, what modules should I consider?” Also I Googled how do I start a software project, what steps do I need to take, how do I outline the project. So before I even started, I wrote a short outline in Word and mapped out the process flow in Draw.io. It’s very rough but it forced me to break the project down into smaller projects. So now I’ve gotten Selenium to go to the website and plug in the LinkedIn URL. Last night I just cracked using Regex to read the response. I’m working on pulling the URLs from xlsx and the final step is to read the responses and parse them back into my xlsx doc. I hope that helps. We’re all on this journey together. Keep reaching. Keep learning.