Growth

Day four was more string work. It was focused on manipulating strings and doing some built in methods to build some analytics.

Challenge:

You’re processing user-submitted restaurant reviews. Real user input is messy — inconsistent casing, extra spaces, typos in structure. Write a program that:

1. Starts with this list of raw reviews exactly as given:

raw_reviews = [
    "  great burger, loved it! ",
    "FRIES WERE COLD. bad experience. ",
    "  the milkshake was amazing. will return.",
    "salad was okay. nothing special.   ",
    "BROWNIE IS A MUST TRY!!  "
]    

2. Writes a function clean_review(review) that:

• Strips leading/trailing whitespace
• Converts to sentence case (first letter capitalized, rest lowercase — look up which method does this in one step)
• Returns the cleaned string

3. Uses a list comprehension to apply clean_review to every review, storing results in cleaned_reviews
4. Writes a function analyze_reviews(reviews) that returns a dictionary containing:

• "total": count of reviews
• "positive": count of reviews containing words like “great”, “amazing”, “loved”, “must”, “will return”
• "avg_length": average character length of the reviews (rounded to nearest whole number)

5. Prints the cleaned reviews and the analysis dictionary cleanly

Things to figure out: how to check if any of several words appear in a string, and how to calculate an average from a list.

Day two was all about dictionaries, which have always been a real struggle for me. I’ve been told by many people that they’ve also struggled with them in the past, so at least I know I’m not alone.

The Challenge:

You’re building a simple restaurant order sytem.

Write code that:

1. Creates a dictionary of menu items with their prices (at least 5 items)
2. Creates an empty list called order
3. Writes a function add_item(order, item_name, menu) that:

• Adds the item to the order list if it exists in the menu
• Prints a warning if the item isn’t on the menu

4. Writes a function get_total(order, menu) that returns the total cost of everything in the order
5. Adds at least 3 items to the order (try adding one that doesn’t exist)
6. Prints the final order list and the total, formatted cleanly

My Code:

menu = {
    'Burger': 15,
    'Fries': 5,
    'Milkshake': 9,
    'Salad': 6,
    'Brownie': 3
}

order = []
total = 0


def add_item(order, item_name, menu):
    if item_name in menu:
        order.append(item_name)
        print(f"Added {item_name} to order.")
    else:
        print(f"Sorry, {item_name} is not on the menu!")

           

def get_total(order, menu):
    total = 0
    for i in order:
        price = menu[i]
        total += price
    
    
    return total

add_item(order, 'Burger', menu)
add_item(order, 'Pizza', menu)
add_item(order, 'Fries', menu)
add_item(order, 'Milkshake', menu)

bill = get_total(order, menu)


print("\nYour order:\n")
print(*order, sep="\n")
print(f"\nTotal: ${bill}")

The results of running the code are:

It’s been a while since I’ve heavily invested time into learning Python and I thought I’d do a refresher course, using Claude AI to help guide mea s an experiment. I decided to have Claude quiz me on what I know already in ten questions and build a 30 day course from there.

I passed the ten questions with flying colors and Claude said that my theoretical knowledge is excellent, so it suggested we get straight into functions and scope for day one.

Have you ever thought about going back to get a degree in your topic here?

I have. Many times.

Yet, I have never been able to personally justify spending tens of thousands of dollars to get a formal degree that may or may not provide a return on that investment. I signed up to do an MBA program several years ago with the University of Illinois, but ended up never taking a single class when I found out that most graduates with that degree don’t make significantly more than their non-MBA degree holding peers.

Mindset is everything.

Sales is arguably a mindset game and most salespeople get it wrong.

Let me tell you why…

Most sales reps I have spoken to over the last decade have told me that the reason they went into sales to begin with is to make more money. There’s no doubt that making commission is a massive upside to working in sales - but the issue arises when the initial motivation becomes the focus of your daily mindset.