So the journey begins

Today I start my training on learning to code. I'm going to give up the majority of my social drinking to learn how to write code, solve problems, create things, etc., etc., then take over the world. It's a really easy step by step plan that starts with "hello world" and ends with me as the supreme overlord of this planet. Don't worry, I promise to be a good overlord.

The only real experience I have with any sort of code is UNIX and some line commands I learned while studying networking in high school and college. Needless to say I'm pretty green when it comes to this stuff. However, I do have a few hours a night before I go to bed where I usually spend money at a bar socializing with people about random crap that doesn't really fulfill much other than killing time and lightening my bank account. So, I'm going to change that for the foreseeable future and you all read along with my somewhat entertaining blog posts. Feel free to leave me words of encouragement, resources to check out, or yell at me about your life problems (I won't help you at all other than being a sounding board, but hey, sometimes that helps)

I've chosen to go with Code Academy's Python course as my starting resource. I asked around at work and Code Academy got the most votes. Others included Coursera, Learn python the hard way and some other resources. I may try more than one of these, but for now we're starting with Code Academy.

I'll also provide some fun metrics along the way for those of you that don't really care what I have to say, and just want the numbers. You all are probably the people I don't want to have lunch with, as I would have to force the conversation between us, but alas, I will appease the four of you that don't really want to read this dribble and chuckle at some of the things I have to say. Because sometimes I make you read all the way to this point just have you read the word poop in your head. Haha, you just said poop in your head. I hope you got a chuckle out of that.

For tonight's lesson I just did the Intro and chapters one and two. Here I learned about setting variables, using operators, strings and console output. I also did two activities a "tip calculator" and a "date and time" manipulation exercise. Both we're simple, but informative. I actually enjoyed this, and that's a good sign because I plan to learn more.

Metrics:

chapters completed = 2
course progress = 19%
backspaces used = a lot
swear words said = 7
tables flipped = 0
calories saves from not going to wine bar = 768 (4 glasses of red wine 8 ounces each)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How do I words?

Image
Setting the mood: Spotify playlist I'm currently listening to while attempting to learn python On this weeks episode of "Patrick attempts to add value to his life", he attempts to words. Yes, you read that right, I attempt to words. Words are hard, and when you say the same two or three almost a billion times out loud, they begin to lose meaning and you as a person begin to lose sanity.  This week conditionals and control flow, which really means I learned about "comparators", "boolean operators", and "If, Else, and Elif" loops. Which translates into human speak as, I learned to say some of the same words so many times they eventually lost meaning and I then added swear words in front of them to hopefully give them meaning. After saying things out loud to myself more times than I'd like to admit I eventually finished my program of a Pig Latin Generator. Yes, I typed in a word "Patrick" and it output "atrickpay...
Read more

Apparently lists and dictionaries are like pizza when it comes to coding...

Image
....because you can slice them!...... Ok bad joke, but seriously, you can. This lesson was incredibly useful, yet infuriating. I spent about two hours on the lesson that should've taken about an hour. I did take a quick break to eat already prepared dinner here at Dropbox which was delicious. In the lesson I learned about lists, dictionaries, and keys. Manipulating these sets of data is essentially the basis for the complicated project I had at the end of the lesson. This weeks lesson was a day in the supermarket. The most confusing part about this less were those little operators in the for loop. Code Academy does this thing where this give you less and less help the more you go through it, but still introduce new stuff that they don't go into much detail on. So in line 23, for the longest time I had stock[item] - 1. Well this is incorrect, because it is just an equation without returning a value. That would be like saying A - 1 instead of A = A - 1. It took one of ou...
Read more