Last year, I visited my high school and was invited to give a talk to their GCSE and A-level students. I’m sure there was lots of room for improvement in my speech, but I enjoyed the experience regardless. In this article, I present the advice that I would give my teenage self if I could travel back in time (assuming I don’t have to worry about causality or time travel paradoxes). This article is aimed at children, teachers, parents and free-thinkers who might have an interest in what I have to say on the subject.

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Digital transformation. Big data. Machine learning. Artificial intelligence. Internet of things. Industry 4.0. There is a digital race going on which every business is taking part in whether they know it or not. With all this excitement about, we all have to ask ourselves whether we have the right skills to thrive in the near future.

Contrary to what the title says, what I actually want to explore in this article is whether or not you should learn to code. It is aimed at undergraduates or employees who don’t have a coding background but are wondering if it’s worth learning to code.

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Planning your first ski holiday can be intimidating, especially if you’ve never tried it as a child. I have only been a couple of times myself, but I can’t recommend it more. It is a truly magical experience that everyone deserves to experience at least once. Magical! You have no idea how much I regret not learning to snowboard while I was still at university.

Where to start? How much does it cost? What equipment do I need? How long will it take me to learn? Is it safe? How early should I start planning? I had so many questions before my first time! This article is aimed at UK residents who are considering going on their first ski/snowboarding holiday.

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You want to try out programming, but you don’t know quite where to start. In this article I share some thoughts on that based on my own experience when I started learning Python a year and a half ago.

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I hate parsing files, but it is something that I have had to do at the start of nearly every project. Parsing is not easy, and it can be a stumbling block for beginners. However, once you become comfortable with parsing files, you never have to worry about that part of the problem. That is why I recommend that beginners get comfortable with parsing files early on in their programming education. This article is aimed at Python beginners who are interested in learning to parse text files.

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This article is dedicated to my father. He had begun lecturing to me about the importance of saving when I was still in primary school. I ignored him for years. Thankfully, like any good parent, he never gave up on me. A year or so into my first job I finally understood what he was trying to tell me. My target audience for this article are graduates in their first job in the UK.

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I had the pleasure of attending PyCon UK for the first time this year. This is a record of my experience of PyCon UK, where I’ll focus on the things that were the most interesting to me. The conference was a five-day event with lectures/workshops on the first four days and sprint sessions on the fifth day. I was slightly worried that I wouldn’t quite fit in with a bunch of programmers since I have an engineering background, but I was blown away by how welcoming the python community was.

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Hello?

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