

Ask HN: 10 questions to test myself? - bluerail

I have been studying python for quite a while now.. After some weeks of initial studying, I felt confident enough and started to learn frameworks (Flask), and started to work on a project for practice..<p>Last week, suddenly it hit me that I am not even proficient in Python itself to begin for a project, so I got back to the learning and doing the practice exercises available in PySchools and coderbyte.<p>I have already completed 140 exercises out of 211 in pyschools without much hiccup, but I still feel that I am not proficient enough.., I am seriously not sure, how much knowledge do I actually have on the language..<p>If you could give me any 10 questions in python or in programming general that an programmer could answer and that if i could get the answer without much effort, i will get some confident..<p>HMO...
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afarrell
Are you looking for questions about the language itself that you could answer
without looking things up? If so, that is foolish. I have 5 years experience
and still look up things in the os module that I've used 10 times before.

Are you looking for challenges & things you could build to prove to yourself
that you are a good programmer?

Here's one: Given an expression of the form (+ 3 5), return the result of
applying the mathematical operation to the two numbers.

execute("(- 9 4)") should return 5

execute("(* 3 9)") should return 18

execute("(% 4 0)") should raise an error

but I suspect what you really want is exercises which you know are really at
your level. This is trickier and it might mean that a class is your best bet.
Perhaps one that applies python to data science.

~~~
bluerail
Yeah, I could solve that expression you have given.. Most of the time I could
see some challenge and able to figure how to work it out quickly... But, when
I start to work on the project, there is this thing that keeps on iterating me
that I am not READY...

In Short, I itself dont know how much proficient i am in python., that's
hitting the learning curve so bad...

~~~
afarrell
Hmmmm... you mean that in your mind, you can produce a sketch of how you would
do it mathematically, but you can't translate that into python? Or do you mean
that you can think of roughly how you would do it in python, but when you sit
down to actually write, you feel you aren't ready?

In either case, I think the following technique would be useful for you. It is
what I do whenever I'm picking up a new language/toolset or when I just don't
feel fluent in what I'm doing. I grab some scrap paper and just use it to
increase my own mental RAM. I jot down things that I'm thinking:

\- questions I have

\- ideas about how I'm going to approach a problem

\- notes from documentation or stackoverflow lookups

\- random talking-to-myself

In the past hour or so, I've been working through setting up a django-cms site
for the first time and the contents of my scratchpad look like:

"""

why does render_block_js have so much javascript?

why is the DOM suddenly blank?

I can try

why can't I navigate to /en/polls/ ?

    
    
      apparently django caches url routing
    

its adding a fucking dollar sign to the end?! why? why?

Opaque. lets pull-request this documentation.

djangocms_polls

oh, I can just re-order

and I should prepend 'blog' to that

"""

This is incomprehensible to anyone. But the point is that I get these things
out of my head and have that much more space to think. Plus, I'm _doing_
something, rather than just sitting in front of a bare text editor frustrated.
I'm talking through why I am frustrated and grappling with the problem in some
way. That makes me less inclined to get distracted (I'm a very distractible
person)

Now, I might be wrong in assuming something that helps my brain will help
yours. If I am, please let me know. Since I spend all day using a brain to
design code, one of the most important skills I try to build is understanding
how people's brains work with code.

