My first big “aha!” moment with Python happened during a project that felt both exciting and intimidating at the time. I was relatively new to the language, still figuring things out, when I decided to use the Cohere Multilingual Embeddings API to align sentences between English and Hausa, my mother tongue. The goal was to create parallel datasets for these languages, a task I wasn’t sure I could pull off.
I manually crafted sentences in both English and Hausa, shuffled them, and ran them through the multilingual embedding model. To my amazement, the model aligned almost every sentence pair correctly. Seeing how Python, combined with powerful APIs, could bridge the gap between languages—even those with limited online text resources—was nothing short of magical.
This experience was incredibly rewarding. It showed me the true power of programming and how it could be harnessed to make a real difference, even for lesser-represented languages like Hausa. The thought that I could align BBC Hausa headlines with their English counterparts to generate useful datasets was a game-changer for me. This project not only boosted my confidence but also deepened my love for Python and what it can achieve.