#thirtydayprogrammingchallenge

[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 :)

[cel-studies-stuff]

thirty day python challenge [1/30]

Woo so I’m actually doing this. However in some ways I feel like today was a cheat seeing as I’m counting my python uni workshop as what I did today. This week was regular expressions which seems to be the death of a lot of people, or at least that’s how my tutor described it haha. So I spent that and this afternoon getting my head around them a bit.

Also, it’s so cool to see there’s a few of you joining me on this challenge! Good luck to you all too!

for anyone in challenge:

if anyone != 0:

funfact = ‘im using the hashtag “thirtydaypythonchallenge” and “thirtydayprogrammingchallenge”’

hashtag = funfact[4]

print(hashtag)

else:

return whatever hashtag you want

- Cel

[chiseld]

30 days of Python: 27/30

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.

Any “pro” studyblr is probably laughing at me after reading this post, but I wanted to share my experience in case there are others out there like me. You’re not alone! Let’s keep grinding and achieve our dreams :)

[chiseld]

30 days of Python: 24/30

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 :)

Today, we’re moving on to working with CSV files – can’t wait!

[chiseld]

30 days of Python: 22/30

I took a picture of my screen, but it was soooo boring I decided not to post it after all :| Important thing is: more Python! More Udemy! Tonight I did the first lesson in the “Files in Python” unit. Nothing big yet, just reading from and writing to files, but more awaits soon...

[chiseld]

30 days of Python: 11/30

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.

Next up: our first milestone project! :D We’re gonna be using PyCharm, which I’ve never used before.

[chiseld]

30 days of Python: 19/30

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.

And finally, as you may have seen me squeeing about in my previous couple of posts, I finished the OOP section of that Udemy course I’ve been loving! This was a super productive day for my studyblr challenge :)

[chiseld]

30 days of Python: 10/30

Nothing much to report for today, just continued my new Udemy course as I’d been planning. I’m still so pleased with it. We learned about things like tuple destructuring and list comprehension today.

[chiseld]

30 days of Python: 1/30

To kick off this impromptu project (thanks to @cel-studies-stuff for the inspiration!), I am diving into the first of Lynn Root’s five project-based python tutorials available at newcoder.io. Project #1 is a data visualization tutorial, and it has been a somewhat challenging journey to get my computer set up right for this. Python 2.7 vs 3, virtual environments, symlinks, and cloned repos, oh my!

I’m still on Part 1 of the project, reading through very carefully line by line to make sure I understand everything. Cool discovery of the day: python’s zip() function :D

[chiseld]

30 days of Python: 28/30

This is probably the slowest that anyone has ever worked their way through the thirty-day challenge 😂 Stubbornness is one quality I’ve definitely got going for me!

Today I saw this daily challenge on dev.to and thought I would give it a try, because I need more practice projects in Python.

I ended up being super proud of my code, which was pretty clean and organized compared to stuff I’ve made before. I reviewed the specs carefully before starting, split up everything nicely into separate functions, named my functions and my variables as transparently as possible, commented my code only where helpful, and generally went about the project in a pretty logical way, I thought. I even tried some new stuff like reversing lists and raising errors. Sure, my code was 61 lines, but I felt good about it!

But then... once I was finished, I returned to the challenge page, scrolled down to the comment section, and read the top comment. It was a JS solution... in four lines.

Sigh. But the guy was a senior dev, which made me feel a li’l better :} That’ll be me someday!

He was able to keep his code so brief because he used regex. This was a great reminder to me that regex is a skill I really need to get comfortable with! So now I’m reading about lookaheads and non-capturing groups, while referencing my favorite regex cheat-sheet.

Me to myself:

[chiseld]

30 days of Python: 20/30

Oof, I fell behind for five solid days! It’s okay, though. Sometimes you just need to take a mental break. I finally returned to my current Udemy course tonight and learned how to make custom errors in Python, using class inheritance :)

[chiseld]

30 days of Python: 17/30

How did it become 1 a.m. when I wasn’t looking >_<

Anyway, today’s Python session was brief but useful – I figured out exactly what aspects of OOP I need to focus more on in order to truly understand the basics. Decided to watch Corey Schafer’s entire playlist on OOP (I linked to one of his videos in my last update post).

[chiseld]

30 days of Python: 13/30

I thought I wasn’t going to be able to code the first milestone app on my own, but it turned out the only thing holding me back was the tiniest error, and once I realized it, the app worked flawlessly! Yippee!

(Admittedly it’s still ridiculously simple, but I’m still pleased.)

Today’s stickers come to us courtesy of the Tumblr app, and feature the energy-foods that got me through today’s study session: luscious ramen and too much coffee :)

[chiseld]

30 days of Python: 12/30

I honestly have no idea what these limited and weirdly specific sticker options on my phone are about, but I’m gonna keep using ‘em, doggone it, because just posting pics of my laptop with Python code on it every day would be very boring :|

Anyway, as the text implies, I used PyCharm for the first time today! (Starting the first milestone project in the Udemy course.) I like the in-app console, that’s an interesting feature.

[chiseld]

30 days of Python: 26/30

Ahhh this is some fun serendipity. I stuck this picture in my drafts a while back, must have been six or seven weeks ago, and completely forgot to post it.

Then today I googled “simple python projects”, feeling a need to solidify my skills after my mini-Renaissance last night (a post about that is coming right up), and found a list of Python project ideas that looked like a good starting point. I quickly threw together the first two projects: a dice simulator and a “guess my number” game.

After that, I checked out my Tumblr drafts and... what do you know? If you look closely at this picture, it appears I was working on a guess-my-number game when I took this! Clearly that was the correct next step for me :P

Next up: Gotta get the version I coded today off of repl.it and onto GitHub instead.

[chiseld]

30 days of Python: 25/30

Just more Udemy! We’re continuing to work with files. And speaking of “with”, today we officially learned about context managers (“with”...“as”), which I was instantly very pleased about. So clean, so neat, so practical.