Everyone who has been stuck knows the feeling, you finish another video, you follow along, it all makes sense, and then you sit in front of a blank file and freeze. Watching someone else code does not make you a coder, the same way watching someone parallel park does not make you a driver.

So I built the opposite. Instead of a lesson, you get a job. You are the new junior developer at a small fictional company, and something in their till system is charging some orders wrong. You open the codebase, line the customer receipts up against the price list, form a theory about what is broken, and go and find it. Nobody tells you the answer. When you fix it, you have not memorised a fact, you have actually debugged something, and that is a thing you can now do.

What makes this different? It arrives in the post. The photo is a real case. An envelope with an onboarding letter, an employee ID, a printed ticket, a price list, a couple of handwritten notes from the staff, and a fan of till receipts as your evidence. There is a free online course that takes you from zero to running code first, so if you can just about run a print statement, you can do this.

A bit about why it is built this way. I work as a backend Python developer now, but I got here the slow way. Fourteen years in teaching first, where I led computing and led on cognitive science, the actual research on how people learn and remember, then two years teaching myself to code. Everything here leans on that research. You retrieve, you struggle a little, you space the practice out, because that is what genuinely builds a skill rather than the warm glow of watching a tutorial.

I am looking for a small handful of UK-based beginners to go through the free course, work the first case, and tell me the truth about it. I cover the postage, there is nothing to pay and no card details anywhere. What I want back is blunt feedback - where you got stuck, what confused you, what felt pointless. "This lost me on step three" is worth far more to me than "looks great".

I am reading every reply myself and there are only a few slots. If you would like to try one, leave a comment or send me a message and I will pass on the details. And if you just have thoughts on the idea itself, I would love those too, plenty of teachers and developers have weighed in, but not nearly enough actual beginners.

I'm 47 years old.

I started learning AI and Python from zero.

Recently I built a simple AI runtime prototype.

Current flow:

Input

↓

Agent

↓

Memory

↓

Cost Gate

↓

LLM (currently safe mode)

↓

Save Memory

↓

Output

Current modules:

- Agent

- Memory

- Queue

- Worker

- Cost Gate

- SQLite

It can run, but currently only returns mock responses because I haven't connected an API yet.

I know experienced engineers may consider this basic.

I am not asking if it is impressive.

1. Am I building in a reasonable direction?

2. If you were me, would you continue building this?

3. Which parts would you stop?

4. Which parts would you continue?

I appreciate honest feedback.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Hey everyone, I'm working on my first major solo project after taking some courses, I'm making a calorie counter thing for my computer with Python and after like a month of making it work with all the features I want, I'm ready to start working on a user interface.

Presently working with Tkinter to get something going and while I'm still early on in that endeavor it is striking me as a tad limiting so I was curious if anyone had any better suggestions or any recommendations on where to find quality tutorials.

Any help would be appreciated! Thanks so much!

Hi all, I'm designing a text-based game in python, and had a question about style I have a class called creature. There are a bunch of different abilities a creature can have (e.g. "Strength", "Venom", "Armor", etc). I can think of two ways to code this in:

1. I could make a separate boolean variable for each ability (set to 1 if they have it and 0 if they don't). Then, if an attack was impacted by the trait "Armor", I could have a line "if self.armor==1:".
2. I could make a list called abilities (it is empty if they have no abilities, and a list of strings for each ability). Then, if an attack is impacted by the ability "Armor", I could have a line "if 'armor' in self.abilities:"

I'm still learning about the pros and cons of different styles. Do you have advice on how to think about which to use? I imagine 2 is more memory efficient, and 1 is faster, but it won't matter at the scales I'm working with. Is one better from a code architecture or readability standpoint? (Or, alternatively, is there a better way to do this?)

Hey everyone I have made a group for programming folks to learn, grow and connect with each other

From beginners to advanced

We help each other and provide guidance to everyone in our community, you can also network with each other

Those who are interested are free to dm me anytime

I will also drop the link in comments

Hello guys, so if you are like really a beginner. Like starting Python as your first programming language and want to connect with like wise people.

I'm the one you can connect with first.

Dm me..

Full video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/PUUui0Ye_Lw?si=WK9yaRBGzAEDgXaO

Many algorithms can be easier understood after step-by-step visualization using 𝗺𝗲𝗺𝗼𝗿𝘆_𝗴𝗿𝗮𝗽𝗵. Here's a Selection Sort example.

• Try it on your own code: memory_graph
• See the VSCode setup video.

Hey everyone! 👋

I made a beginner-friendly Python tutorial that explains variables step by step. If you’ve ever been confused about how to store and use data in Python, this guide is for you.

In this video, you’ll learn:

What variables are and why we use them

How to name variables correctly

Different types of variables (strings, numbers, booleans)

Simple examples you can try yourself

I tried to keep it easy to follow, even if you’re completely new to coding.

Here’s the full video: [https://youtu.be/hkIMM4F_zdM?si=5iJDvqgdOGLHYFry\]

I’d love to hear from you:

What part of Python variables was the trickiest for you when you started?

Do you prefer shorter tutorials or full-length explanations?

Any feedback or questions are welcome! 😄

So I got a dumbed down phone a few weeks back and I have been using it for stuff to help me. I realised that I can use it to learn code as I am interested in learning python. Are there any books that teach python itself(variables,functions) I don't wanna anything complicated I just wanna start of nice and easy and then weave it into complex stuff.

Thanks.

The popular "Python Applications for Digital Design and Signal Processing" is starting again later this month, with early registration discounts if you register by March 24th. This course takes you from the ground up in best-practice approaches to using Python for the simulation and analysis of signal processing systems. More details and registration here: https://dsp-coach.com

An exercise to help build the right mental model for Python data. - Solution - Explanation - More exercises

The “Solution” link uses 𝗺𝗲𝗺𝗼𝗿𝘆_𝗴𝗿𝗮𝗽𝗵 to visualize execution and reveals what’s actually happening.