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Business

Chris Reeder
Chris Reeder
3,205 Points

Next Steps after Android

Good Day Everyone!!!

So i've got some solid experience in Android and am actually waiting around for some other things to happen so I can publish an app on the app store. Long story short - I'm looking for something to do until then and I can't decide between learning Python or trying to learn SQL.

I work in Finance and it would be amazing to implement a database to handle large sets of our our data outside of excel. //SQL

But I'm also interested in doing some coding challenges and hackathons. I like the idea of being involved in the community. //Python

Actually, making an old pokeymon (redblue version) styled game for android could also be really fun.

Thoughts????

Jeffrey James
Jeffrey James
2,636 Points

I would learn more about what makes you money right now. So, first learn about creating tables in SQL and writing the queries you normally would in Excel. This will force you to become familiar with indices and dealing with large csv's, perhaps some psql as well (postgres command line language).

Then, once you have enough sense about that (probably 20 - 30 hours of the above), learn about Python, but focus on the Psycopg2 module, with is the dominant postgres wrapper. Likely, some of the db ops you did directly in postgres could be handled directly using python and the csv data. On your way you'll have to deal with bugs and transforming the csv data into python data structures which the psycopg2 package can handle.

Don't spend too much time on theory or academic projects - you'll never remember anything! My 2 cents

1 Answer

missgeekbunny
missgeekbunny
37,033 Points

My personal recommendation is to learn what will help you most get to your end goal. With talking about the Pokemon type game you wanted to make, I'd personally recommend learning about databases. They're slightly different in android but the base concepts sound like they will be helpful to you in both your job in real life and understanding how databases work in general can help with the app you want to build. Also your reasons for learning python sound a little less than stellar. Not trying to be mean or anything but there are ways to be a part of hackathons and code sit ins without python. I've dedicated very little time to python and have participated in both those things. Most of which with WordPress. If you have other reasons you aren't stating or if you really like your local python communities, that would change the impression I gave above. But if it's just to be at a hackathon or code event, you don't need python to do that.