#thirtydaypythonchallenge

So while stressing over 8 mini essays I have to write for another unit I squeezed in doing some of the homework exercises from the first few weeks I didn’t do. This was just importing the mean option, adding to lists, finding the max of that list and printing the result.

There is surely a much easier way to do this but I just wants to do it quickly. Also one that uses proper variable names and not single letters.

Last night I was going through my blog and doing some tag maintenance (still in progress), and I realized that the next day – today, August 10 – is my third anniversary of starting to learn to code for real!

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve progressed slowly. I hear about some coding newbies who reach (or even surpass) my current level within a few months of starting to study. But I think those people are usually doing it full-time, all day every day, so I don’t feel too bad :) I’ve been taking more of a slow-but-steady approach these past three years, sometimes not coding at all for months at a time, and then other times doing it every day for hours. And it’s been working, bit by bit.

Today, appropriately enough, I reached two new milestones:

1) I finally, FINALLYYYYYYYY completed my greatly delayed “30 days of Python” challenge that I started almost four months ago :D

2) I finished all the basic logic for my first “serious” app, a web scraper I started working on two days ago. It’s an interfaith calendar – I found a webpage that lists all the major holidays for various religions, and my app will tell you if the current day is a religious holiday according to that list. Sounds simple, but was kind of complicated because the DOM structure of the webpage is a bit of a disaster :P

In any case, I finished all the fundamental code to make it do what I want it to do, and now all I have to handle is all the edge cases caused by the source site’s messiness. That’ll be at least a couple more days of work. But I still feel so PROUD of my little project!

Knock on wood, I seem to be coming out of a month-and-a-half slump when it comes to coding. For a while I just couldn’t motivate myself. But last night I dove back into my Udemy course and did something practically revolutionary (for me):

I reviewed material we’d already covered.

I know, I know, this doesn’t sound like a big deal. But I must confess, I am a horrible studyblr. Almost never during my entire academic career have I looked at the same material more than once. And that worked fine... until now.

After zipping through the first four or five units of this fantastic Python course, I started to realize the concepts weren’t sticking in my brain anymore. I was moving too fast without getting a chance to apply what I’d learned. So, being my impatient and perfectionist self, I... gave up. Just stopped working with the course entirely.

This is why I say I’m a horrible studyblr! I’m so accustomed to learning effortlessly that as soon as I run into something that requires hard work, I toss it away in a huff. But I need to keep reminding myself that this is exactly why I got into computer science: because it DOESN’T come naturally to me, and for once in my life I want to challenge myself to tackle a topic I can’t just coast through.

I WANT to do that hard work. I WANT to plug away stubbornly, achieving my goals through patience and determination and exposure rather than flashes of brilliant insight. I want to have this life experience, because I think it will be really good for me.

So I returned to my Udemy course yesterday and went two full units back, and began re-watching videos. It was drudgery at first. But guess what? I UNDERSTOOD. Going through the content this second time, reviewing OOP principles and dunder methods and so on, I really got it – on a deeper level than I had the first time. And that feels awesome.

Now I’m working on a small practice project, just throwing it together in repl.it. It’s not coming naturally to me. And I love that. This is a path of blood, sweat, and tears – but it’s the path that I’ve chosen.

I think I may have missed a day or two of actual coding activity that I simply didn’t remember to blog about, but I’m erring on the side of caution and calling this only one day’s worth of update.

Just more Udemy course, as usual. (The IDE in the pic is PyCharm.)

We’ve started the unit on working with files (reading from them, writing to them), and I love it! The second or third lesson of the unit was already a challenge: the teacher described a simple app and suggested that we try to make it on our own before he shows us how. Of course I was excited to do that – and I managed to get the whole thing going by myself! It wasn’t exactly the same as his, but it met all the specs.

The one thing that threw me was that I forgot you can’t modify elements in an iterable in-place by reassigning them inside a for loop (or if you can, I haven’t learned how yet – I was trying “for x in y: x = modified_x” and that clearly didn’t work, so I had to make a new list every time and sequentially append modified_x to that list).

But I debugged that okay, and the reading-from/writing-to files stuff went just fine, and I didn’t even get thrown by the newline at the end of each line in a file – I learned how to use the .strip method, which was cool :)

My study pics generally turn out pretty boring because my room is dark and it’s just my computer every time, so I tried to jazz it up a bit this time with some cute stickers.

Today we did more list comprehensions, lambda functions, and first-class vs. higher-order functions. I’ve now completed 2 out of 19 sections of this course, and am still really enjoying this guy’s teaching style.

Long overdue, but today I finally checked out a site I’ve had bookmarked for ages: the coding “game” CheckIO. It’s basically a normal coding-challenge site, but dressed up with this cute interface that makes it feel more like a game.

I also worked through this tutorial on using packages and modules, created by Sheena from codementor.io – it was really helpful and written in a clear and comprehensible manner.