Mak'

This year’s? We can’t even make it through this sprint’s roadmap without a deviation.

Bonus points if it’s C-suite crashing the sprint.

I think you’ve already gotten some good answers here regarding the function itself:

It sits and waits for the user to input something and hit Enter, and returns the value the user entered, which is then assigned to your nam variable. (See the documentation for the function.

I might also offer the advice of confirming your understanding of the flow of a program. That is, understand that, in the general sense, the computer must resolve the right-hand side of the equals sign to a value before it can assign it to the left.

For example, if the right-hand side is a literal value, it’s already resolved. For example, a line like name = “Joe” is easy—assign the string literal “Joe” to the variable name, when the line is run.

If the right hand side is a mathematical equation, it must be resolved to a value when the line is run. For example, for a line like value = 2+2, the 2+2 must be resolved to 4 before it can be assigned to the variable.

Then, for something like name = input(“Who are you?”), in order to resolve the right-hand side, the computer must first run the function before it can assign a value to the variable name.

It can, of course, get more complicated, where you can call multiple functions on a line, and the results of one feed into the next, and so on. But, that can be an exercise for the near future.

I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that I’m 25 years into my career and I’ve only just started to put this into practice. (I say “slightly” because, hey, I’ve been doing this without any advice or mentorship, and, maybe, one can be forgiven for not finding this stuff self-obvious…)

Took a new position and got tired of people scheduling my lunch four out of five days a week. In addition to the meetings before and after, it often meant most of my day in meetings without a break.

So, I threw a tentative meeting for that time slot and the number of lunchtime meetings cratered. Somehow, folks were able to figure out another time or solve it without a meeting. Only twice in four months have I been asked if that “meeting” could be moved.

Needless to say, I’m a convert and would wholeheartedly recommend the practice—of scheduling a self-meeting, for any purpose, be it lunch or even just productive time—to folks well before they hit 25 years.

Substitute “walking down a road” with: “having dinner at a conference”, “chatting over lattes at the local coffee shop”, or “at a neighborhood cookout” as makes sense.

…so far.

That’s something I think I’d like to use, but I don’t know if could get over the fact that neither the date nor the time are in ISO 8601 format.