My journey of beginning to learn Python3 this week, and applying to Microsoft’s LEAP apprenticeship program.

Part 1: My application to Microsoft LEAP

For those of you that follow when highly coveted software engineering apprenticeships open up for applications, Microsoft LEAP’s applications opened up this last week. I had had my eye on this one, much like everyone else, not only because it was well Microsoft, but also because this is a company that I have essentially grown up with (90s kid here) and is based within about 30 minutes of my hometown.

After finding out about this apprenticeship, and attending an informational webinar, I did my own research and found that wholly moly this is apparently a HUGE deal; like a highly sought after rare gemstone. I had read all sorts of things about how their application was really difficult and had essay questions! Oh my, I haven’t really done essay questions since I graduated high school 😬 So after being thoroughly terrified of this application, I decided to wade into the deep end, and actually take a look at this so-called monstrous beast. To me, it seemed like a pretty straightforward application with all of the usual culprits of name, address, discipline, etc etc. And then came the essay questions. They seemed more like short essay questions, especially since your response is limited to 2500 characters including spaces per question, but I digress. This cohort’s questions were:

1. Why are you interested in this pathway?

2. Describe a project that you completed. What was the most challenging part of the project? How did you manage that challenge?

I managed to write out my responses and have come away seemingly unscathed so far. For now, I’ll cross my fingers and hope that maybe just maybe I have a shot of at least moving on to the next round. It’s gonna be a long three weeks!

Part 2: Learning Python

I’ve only just begun learning Python, and so can’t really say a whole lot on the topic as I don’t feel I have learned quite enough yet to really distinguish it from the other languages I’ve learned so far (JavaScript and Ruby). Although from the very little I have covered so far it does seem to be quite similar to Ruby.

The data types are similar in that some of them are the exact same, as I hope would be expected, but there are some new ones that I haven’t seen before (I’m looking at you tuples and sets). Printing something to the console is largely the same:

//Python
print('Hello World')
//Ruby
pring 'Hello World'

You can still do arithmetic just like you can in ruby with all of the regular operators + — */%**().

One difference I did come across was with string methods; in particular, slicing a string. In ruby it has the following syntax:

myString = 'Hello World'
myString.slice(1,5)
# or
myString[1,5]

It allows you to provide the index at which you wish to start, and where you want to end; you could even provide a range if you so chose. Where python really differs though is you can provide a ‘step’ number so that when it runs thru it will ‘jump’ however many characters you have specified:

# syntax: [startIndex : stopIndex : step]
myString[1:7:3]
# returns eo

The beginning and end indexes are also optional if you wanted to run from the beginning and stop at the end!

myString[::]
# Hello World
myString[::3]
# HlWl

This seems like it would be extremely useful if you are doing some serious manipulation with strings!

Hopefully, this small insight has been helpful. I’m sure that as I move forward in my python studies that I’ll have more tidbits to share.