Python OH Python!!!
DataraFlow Diaries #1
Week one of my data science internship with DataraFlow is officially in the books, and I have to be honest — I didn’t expect a setup process to be the biggest challenge of the week, But here we are.
Getting Started
Before I even wrote a single line of actual course code, I had to get my environment ready: VS Code, Python, a virtual environment, Jupyterthe whole stack. I thought this would take twenty minutes. It took a lot longer than that.
My virtual environment kept failing to activate, I spent what felt like half my week fighting with a terminal that refused to cooperate. My python command kept returning absolutely nothing, no error, no output, just silence and it turns out Windows had quietly swapped in some Microsoft Store alias that does nothing instead of actually running Python. I didn't know that was even a thing until it happened to me. On top of that, I somehow ended up with a folder nested inside a folder with the exact same name, so half my commands were technically running in the wrong place without me realizing it. And just when I thought I'd found the fix, a random KeyboardInterrupt cut off my virtual environment creation halfway through, leaving me with a broken setup that looked fine until I tried to actually use it.
How I solved it: mostly patience, and learning to actually read what the terminal was telling me instead of panicking at red text. I deleted and recreated the environment a couple of times, restarted VS Code fully (not just the terminal, the whole app), and eventually got a clean, working setup with (.myenv) proudly sitting in my prompt. Small win, but it felt huge.
The actual learning part of the week was honestly a lot of stress and fun. I got properly introduced to Python, with the basics like data types used in python such as integers, floats, strings, booleans, and even complex numbers, which I genuinely didn’t know existed in Python until this week. I worked with operators like ** for powers, % for remainders, and // for floor division. I got into lists, and then nested lists, which took a minute to wrap my head around, especially the indexing into a list inside a list inside another list it felt like opening one box just to find another box inside it.
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Loops were a big one this week too, for and while, and that pattern of keeping a "running answer" that updates as you go, which showed up over and over once I started noticing it. I wrote functions, learned how parameters and return values actually connect, got introduced to dictionaries and key-value pairs, and even touched basic file handling — writing to and reading from a text file. I also learned about try and except for catching errors instead of letting your whole program crash, which honestly should've existed for my venv setup too.
What I Built
By the end of the week I’d built a handful of small programs — a vowel counter, a program to find the largest and second largest number in a list, a palindrome checker, a number guessing game (which didn’t work at first because I forgot to actually ask for a new guess inside my loop), a Fibonacci sequence generator, the FizzBuzz challenge, and a little program that saves and reads back student names from a file.
Biggest Challenge of the Week
If I’m being honest, the trickiest thing to wrap my head around wasn’t even a bug, it was understanding why a, b = b, a + b actually works. i had to learn that Python quietly calculates everything on the right side first, before touching either variable, took a bit of rewatching tutorials to get it in my head. Once it clicked though, it made a bunch of other things click with it.
Going Forward
Going into week two, I’m hoping I get the chance to catch my breath and dive deeper into Python, really writing and understanding the code. Week one has already shown me that these six months are going to be full of hurdles and probably way too many stories to tell, but I’m ready for every single one of them. And don’t worry, I’ll bring all the stories back to y’all, lol.
See you in Diary #2.
