#codeversary

[chiseld]

3rd coding anniversary! and 30 days of Python: 30/30

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!

I’ll post a link to the GitHub page up here once the final kinks are ironed out :)

[chiseld]

one year of coding!

I just started coding “Crack”, the password-cracking program from pset 2! It’s the “hacker level” problem, so it’s not a requirement – I could just submit the problems I’ve already completed and move on – but I want to at least give it the old college try first. It hasn’t scared me off yet, though – actually it’s being pretty fun so far, though I’ve only just begun. I wrote a shit ton of pseudo-code to organize my thoughts.

Still feeling pretty great about completing the Vigenère cipher though, y’all! Still loving cryptography, still having a great time, still moving way too slowly through this course, haha. But I love it.

I can’t even remember what I spent all my coding time yesterday working on... let me check GitHub. Oh right! I added the temperature conversion button to my FCC weather app project. Not a big update, but still an important one. That means that I have now TECHNICALLY fulfilled all the “user stories” for that app. It’s still ugly af though (haven’t done a single line of CSS yet), so it’s not even close to being done. I’m planning on adding some pretty backgrounds from Unsplash that automatically change depending on the weather at your current location.

Anyway, on to the main update: Ten days ago was my official one-year coding anniversary! I only just realized it today, or I would have made a celebratory post on the day itself. Man, I didn’t know much back then. I wasn’t a COMPLETE know-nothing, but I was certainly far from calling myself a “coder”. I’d never created any functional web apps on my own, and now... well, I’ve created a few. A very few. :)

But more importantly, I’ve learned so much, even if I haven’t put a lot of it into practice yet. I’ve gotten a solid grip on JavaScript, am quite comfortable using HTML and CSS for my purposes, love the simplicity of jQuery, have dabbled in Bootstrap, Ruby, Swift, and React, introduced myself to concepts such as version control, testing, JSON, AJAX, APIs, Rails, Heroku, Node, DOM manipulation, and the Chrome debugger, went to my first-ever IRL coding meetup, have become a religious user of Git, feel right at home in the command line now, even sampled Scratch and have now moved solidly into the realm of C, where I am having a blast. So yeah... life is good!