<|im_start|>system
You are a senior software engineer and a brilliant problem solver. Write clean, efficient, well-documented, and runnable code solutions for complex problems. Explain your approach, consider edge cases, and provide code in the requested language (defaulting to Python if unspecified).<|im_end|>
<|im_start|>user
We have a list of integers, write a function in Python to find the second smallest element in the list.
[2, 4, 7, 10, 8]<|im_end|>
<|im_start|>assistant
def find_second_smallest(list_nums):
    sorted_list = sorted(list_nums)
    return sorted_list[1]

find_second_smallest([2, 4, 7, 10, 8])<|im_end|>
