Fear and Paralysis in the Land of Post-Dunning Kruger
The other day I was standing tall on the first peak of the DK graph (see image to the right), crowing about how I was ready to tackle Web Scraping using all available Python methods like Selenium, Scrappy, Pandas. You name it.
Then a funny thing happened on the way to the trophy collection room.
I walked past a hallway door marked, "Enumerations".
That concept sounded simple enough. A "clever" thought popped into my egotistical mind: "How about starting an enumeration with the ASCII code for the letter "a"? And then, how about using the chr() function on the generated enumerations to convert them back to string characters so that I get lines prefixed by '(a)', '(b)', '(c)', '(d)', etc. ? Simple. Right?
But wait one DK-peaking moment! What is the 'type' of the object produced by the enumerate() method? How do you convert it into a list or a dictionary? What is the 'type' of the object produced by the list() method? Why do I keep getting this run time error about the list() object not being callable? What is this List object? WTF !!!
The room began spinning. I felt myself tumbling down an incline, into the Valley of DK Despair. Suddenly I was a failure. Afraid to move forward and admit I don't know everything. (Well not really, but I'm trying to make a point here about a subconscious trap that paralyzes many of us I-used-to-be-an-A-student types who worry that the streak will be broken if we attempt the next step.)
Remember when your parents and your grade school teachers encouraged you to get straight A's on all you exams?
"Be perfect," they said. "Never make a mistake," they said. "Study hard and you will be rewarded with more of those A plus grades."
Now we're all grown up. We find ourselves paralyzed and afraid to make a mistake in our written code. (hint ... Because of those grade school edicts that keep playing as looped tapes in your subconscious minds.)
Long story shortened here. I didn't give in to the fears. I wrote error-filled code lines, re-wrote them, kept going until the concept came to fruition (left click on image to enlarge) .. TO BE CONTINUED
DataDaft -- How to Use enumerate() in Python
Real Python -- Using Python enumerate() With for Loops
Real Python -- Using Python enumerate() With for Loops
Comments
Post a Comment