r/pythonhelp

I am a college student who is hoping to get into financial analytics and I want to learn how to code in python. Are there any websites or videos I can use to learn?

I’ve noticed many beginners start learning Python because of AI, Data Science, and automation trends, but a lot of them lose motivation after a few weeks.

Some focus only on watching tutorials without practicing, while others try to learn too many technologies at the same time.

From your experience, what do you think is the biggest mistake beginners make while learning Python?

Would also like to know what helped you improve faster while learning programming.

I have a need to send an SMS text to a specific phone from a Python program when an event completes. This event is often a daily occurrence but not always - I probably send 250-300 messages over a year.

I started doing this a couple of years ago when the carriers allowed SMS via email. I'd just send the message to a phone number at the carrier's messaging server (<phone#>@mms.att.net, for example). The carriers shut these off a few months ago so I went looking for an alternative.

I found 'TextBelt.com' and signed up, buying a quota of over 700 messages for USD$11. I figured getting two years of simple messages for that price was pretty fair, and the coding was easy.

But, TextBelt seems to have died. On April 24, my code reported my remaining quota was 536 messages. On April 25 (and since), the attempt to send a message fails due to a quota of 0.

I have notified TextBelt support and even sent a message to the founder, Ian. I have not heard anything back since the problem started. I fear it is dead and gone.

Until this is either fixed or I find another provider/solution, I added code to send the message via email after the 5th failure.

So I'm back to looking for a stable and inexpensive solution to send a text message to one phone number about daily. In the research I've done in the past week, I've found a number of offerings, all geared to sending marketing, status, and other messages from businesses, with monthly costs. Way too much to spend for my needs.

Any suggestions?

I just started python on Pycharm and it's a good IDE but it takes too much storage on my laptop, my laptop lags alot it works less and lags alot when checked on the performance tab pycharm was eating it all. Should I try to stay on Pycharm or switch it to VS code ?

I focus on the practical path to getting started quickly while still building a solid foundation. That includes setting up the Pulumi project, configuring the GCP provider, working with a Python-based infrastructure definition, and understanding how Pulumi tracks state and applies changes. I also cover the basic developer workflow for previewing updates, deploying resources, and making iterative changes safely. The goal is to make the first experience with Pulumi and GCP feel approachable, especially if you already know Python and want to use that skill set to manage cloud resources.

Long story short, i want to make THE most horrible python calculator to ever exist. For that i need a way to call an assembly instruction directly in my python script.

I know you can do that in C with inline assembly, and i know CFFI exists and allows calling C functions in python, so i tried to use that. However CFFI's parser rejected __asm__ syntax and threw an error because inline assembly isn't standard C apparently.

Is there some sort of a workaround to call an assembly instruction in python script? It doesn't have to be clean, in fact, it's better if it's absolutely terrible, bonus points for unsafe