Python, Interview Observations and Getting Back to the Blog.
07/03/2026 — Post #3
Welcome back.
Now that everyone is returning to work after Christmas, and is experiencing the new year, new me feels - I thought I'd try and engagement bait by talking about moving into an IT career...
Something I've noticed — and heard from friends who have moved into IT as a second career is that moving into technical roles comes with a particular frustration: the experience gap problem. You study for certifications, you build home labs, you deliver a decent interview and at the end of it you run into feedback that amounts to "not enough hands-on BAU experience to hit the ground running."
It's a fair call on the employer's side. Day-to-day enterprise IT work is something you can't entirely replicate through home labs and certifications, and needing someone operational from week one is a legitimate position to take. The part that gives me slight pause is that this is often identifiable from a CV before the interview stage. If there was never an intention to take a chance on an outside bet then it only leads to waste candidates time, as there isn't any valuable feedback that can be gained from "You don't have enough direct experience" when everyone in the process was aware of that on day 0.
It's a frustrating dynamic, and from what I can tell, a fairly common one for people trying to make this particular step up.
The more useful response, I think, is to identify the concrete gaps and go fill them.
Back to Learning: Python
After a look at the job market and a bit of reflection, I decided the most useful thing I could do right now was go deeper on Python. I’d picked up the Udemy course “Python Mega Course: Build 20 Real-World Apps and AI Agents” by Ardit Sulce, a while back and hadn’t properly committed to it. So the past three weeks have been largely dedicated to that. Which is also why this post is late.
I’d done some introductory Python through FreeCodeCamp previously, so the early modules moved quickly. But once the course got into building actual applications, a few things clicked in ways that felt worth writing down.
What I’ve learnt so far
Now, I want to be clear, I have learnt more than just the point below. However, this was definitely an ‘ah-ha’ moment for me:
When building a CRUD app, you almost never want your data to live only inside the script. Lists in memory disappear the moment the session ends. You need to persist data to a .csv, .txt file, or database; and then load it back into a list at the start of each session so your logic has something to work with.
file.read() pulls the stored data into your script at the start of a session.
You work with the in-memory list throughout, then use file.write() to overwrite the file once you’re done. The file is the source of truth; the list is your working copy.
In a for i in x: loop, you need to actually iterate through the list, not just reassign i repeatedly. I’ve caught myself doing the latter more than once, typically in inverse proportion to how much coffee I’ve had. It’s one of those mistakes that’s obvious in retrospect and invisible in the moment.
Putting It to Use at Work
One of the more satisfying things about this course is that it’s already translated into something practical at work. I built a script to process a mailbox report of 3,000+ entries: parsing domain names, identifying duplicates and partial matches, and outputting a clean result that stakeholders could use to make decisions about which mailboxes to keep or retire.
It’s not a complex script by any measure, but it solved a real problem, saved a reasonable amount of manual effort, and more usefully for me, made the concepts feel grounded in something concrete (and made me look clever). That’s been the most valuable thing about the course so far: the emphasis on building actual things rather than just drilling syntax which is a common situation you can .
What’s Next
I’m currently moving into the API integration, LangChain, and Django sections of the course. Once I’ve worked through Django I’ll be making a proper start on Stratus — the wellbeing journal app. I’ll give that project its own dedicated post when the time comes, rather than tucking it in at the end of a general update.
Currently Reading
I’m partway through “Piranesi” by Susannah Clarke. So far it’s been a gripping read that has kept me curious from the start. The world building is fantastic and immediately striking; and the narration from the titular character is so distinct and enticing. Anyway, in Piranesi, the narrator keeps a meticulous, earnest journal of their world, and it is inspiring me to try and be a bit more consistent with this blog.
Also worth a mention: I finished “The Tetris Effect” by Dan Ackerman earlier in the year and it’s one I’d genuinely recommend. It’s the story of how Tetris went from a side project built at an underfunded Soviet research institute to the most downloaded video game of all time and all against the backdrop of the fall of the USSR and its opening up to the rest of the world. Surprisingly gripping for what is, technically, a book about a tile-matching game.
Until next time.
— Matt