It’s ❗️ wild ❗️ to think about, but thirty years after studying business informatics at the University of Mannheim, I finally built my first Python application last Tuesday. The inspiration came from a conversation with Ali Raza that was supposed to be 30 minutes long but ended up lasting over an hour. It was time well spent. Thanks, Ali!

The mission: a daily email with the latest banking and crypto news, summarized from feeds in the DACH and MENA regions. The best part? It's all running on GitHub, completely free.

My university days were all about C++ and Java, and my first personal website was a fun HTML project. But Python? I'd never touched it.

This project was a true test of how far we've come. The initial version of the code was drafted by ChatGPT in about five minutes. It then took me another eight hours to get it running smoothly. Three hours were just for setup—getting my old GitHub account back in action, setting up Google API keys, and finding a decent code editor.

The real challenge? A single, invisible character. I spent four hours chasing down the error:

  'ascii' codec can't encode character '\xa0'.

I finally got it working by using both Gemini and ChatGPT to rewrite and debug the code.

Building this same application back in the day would have easily taken me a week, if not longer. This experience was a powerful reminder that while the fundamentals of problem-solving remain, the tools we have now, especially Generative AI, have completely transformed the speed of creation.

My Python app on GitHUB

🔗 https://github.com/FrankSchwab/DailyFinanceNewsAgent

Comments and further development of the app are highly appreciated - after all it is an open source project :-)

#SundayThoughts

#banking #coding #python #AI #GenAI #Megatrends #42megatrends

FrankSchwab.de