We didn’t have a video player, but our friends had a Looney Tunes VHS that included rabbit season / duck season, the Bugs Bunny opera, left turn at Albuquerque, and Duck Dodgers

We must have watched it over 100 times

A real world problem that would help a real person

A friend coordinates a group of kayakers. Each week they kayak on Wednesday and Saturday mornings. To choose where to go they consult tide listings for the mouth of local creeks and rivers, then randomly select a site that meets a minimum tide height (the threshold is different for each site)

Ideally a Python project would:

• Take a list of locations (as lat long, or choose from a map)

Each location has:

1. a threshold value for tide height (minimum height)
2. a preferred direction (e.g. if you enter near the mouth, you want a falling tide so you paddle hard first then easy)
3. an earliest start time (further locations get a later time, specified by the user)

• Calculate the tide height for each location (calc on wikipedia) between 7am and 9am on each Wednesday and Saturday

• Randomly select a location and time (that meets the threshold value, tide direction, and earliest start time) for each date

• Choose a different location if the randomly chosen location was used as one of the previous x locations

• Return the list of dates, times, locations, tide heights, and tide directions in a human readable format e.g. csv

And it keeps growing, there are another 5 that didn’t fit in the screenshot

It tells you right there in the log: “DRDY”

Your employer does not care about you. You are not important or irreplaceable

Take your time and energy and put it into your life, not their business

I have had coworkers die (not work related) and by the time you hear about it (like the next day) they have already worked out who will get the work done so the machine doesn’t have to stop