I never liked programming until I started working as an Intern at Gramener.

As an Intern, I started building simple dashboards using existing Gramex v0.x visual components like bar chart, line chart etc. But I had no idea of how they were developed or work behind the scenes.

My mentor, Anand S, who is also the Co-founder & CEO of Gramener, pulled me into a project called Automating visualizations on PowerPoint using Python. The combination of keywords in the title surprised and confused me. I had no idea where to start and did not want to ask Anand, thinking it could be a silly question.

I dabbled around for a week and I found a blog written by a Chinese programmer on a similar topic titled “Automating PowerPoint with Python”. This excited me, and gave a kickstart to my project. I set up the environment and copy-pasted the code as instructed and it worked!

I kept reading and at end of the blog, the blog author credited Anand S for his original work on this.

Since then, I have always looked for solutions if someone else has already worked on a similar problem and tinker around it.

Google it, ask your Friends, Colleagues, or community 🙂

Note: Do not just ctrl+c, ctrl+v the code, try to understand line by line, logic, and approach.

You will learn how to code or code better and compare multiple approaches.

This lesson gave me a whole new perspective on coding and I realized how powerful it is to program your own software or tool.