Programming has always been a hobby for Tim Techathuvanan.
He is now a mathematician and systems analyst at the Baltimore Computer Consulting Company. Holden Information Services. But Techathuvanan said programming was a skill he nurtured while earning his doctorate. in mathematics, as well as a career as a financial analyst for more than 20 years with organizations such as Campbell & Company, US Securities and Exchange Commission after that T price. Rowe.
Working as an IT professional is now a career move for Techathuvanan, but coding has always been a part of his job, as he has used MATLAB, the R statistical computer programming language, and Python to create business models during his time at T. Price Rowe.
“I wouldn’t have advanced in finance with just a doctorate. in math, as dumb as it sounds,” said Techathuvanan Techncal.ly. “If I hadn’t been able to program, no one would have hired me to do the work I was doing. The math degree tells people that I know how to solve problems and can stick to a tough situation. »
With Holden Information Services, Techathuvanan works in automation around server maintenance. He writes scripts related to when computers are added and removed from a company’s network, while creating scripts that give data on who is using all the hard drive space or memory on a client company’s server .
“Because there are so many computers and it’s these monolithic systems that we’re trying to connect, I have code that will dump one report from this system, one from this system, and one from this system. Then glue them all together and see where we are missing pieces,” Techathuvanan said.
But it’s his daily job. In his off hours, he likes to play wordle – you know, the daily digital pun that took the world and your Twitter feed by storm earlier this year.
Techathuvanan loves puzzles and problem solving. Wordle was the puzzle; the problem was identifying how good he was at Wordle and how to improve. To solve the problem, he created a bot that made and scored guesses in Wordle with the goal of creating the best Wordle player and then comparing itself to him.
“Pretty much anything you want to do, there’s someone who has already written a library for it,” Techathuvanan said – so he found a Python library with a Wordle dictionary to start with. Then he created his own script to play the game. The bot then knows the correct word of the day and shows him the optimal way to play given a given guess: when Techathuvanan adds a guess, he receives a numerical number indicating the ability of the word to lead to the correct answer.
The video below is a demonstration of the bot and breaking down the code, so if you’re obsessed with your Wordle skills, you can get the basics of creating your own bot to test your mettle. (The code for his bot isn’t available on GitHub.) Or perhaps use his instructions as a starting point to dream up your own Python side project to hone your programming skills.
Donte Kirby is a 2020-2022 corps member of Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation. -30-
