Doing short 20 hour projects seems to work better for me.

To that end, here are my goals for September

• 20h of emacs - goal - get familiar
• 20h of Dvorak - goal - get upto 35wpm
• walk daily - goal - 10000 steps or 90m daily

More as I figure this out.

Daily programming is dead! Long live working towards daily goals!

So all I’m doing is switching to Dvorak and continuing daily progress.
BEHOLD! My awesomness at Dvorak! 😂

• Much better at gtypist lesson Q1
• Also automated resizing and compressing my gtypist screenshots via an Automator folder action
• Done with Chapter 9 of the Lutz Book. I now know of tuples and strings

Updates:

• Daily use of Vim continues. Combining it (for the daily posts at least) with touch typing. Everything is terribly slow! It can only get better from here out :)
• Completed all of lesson Q1 in gtypist today again. Went faster this time. Confident enough to start Q2, Monday onwards.
• Learnt how to configure basic authentication on an Nginx site. Feel like I can manage my own stuff now. With this I think, I’ve done my 20 hours of Nginx too :)

• Done with the whole first lesson in Gtypist today!
  All 8 levels! Yippee!
• Finished another baby app, that tells you how many days to your birthday.
• Finished up, chapter 8 of the Lutz book. Dictionaries make so much more sense now.

• 15 mins each, of Gtypist & Vim done

Updates:

• Last Vim update. Am fairly ok with using it as my daily text editor now. And the anki deck is almost committed to memory. Think my twenty hours are done today :)
• Done with 15 mins of gtypist. Getting slowly better.
• Done with watching 5 chapters of the Jumpstart course. Will practice them tomorrow.

Updates:

• 09.45 – gtypist improves slowly by the day. Getting better, yet stretching
• 14.15 – vim moves ahead well!

Updates:

• 15.00 – Done with all the new cards in the Vim Anki Deck. A few more days and I think I’ll drop Vim from the updates. While I’ll never be as fast or productive as other Vim speed demons, that’s not what I’m aiming for anyhoo. I just want to be as fast and error free as I was with DOS edit in the late 90s :P
• 15:30 – Slower but more accurate with gtypist today.
• Got half of Chapter 7 in the Lutz book done
• Watched the video for App 3 in the Jumpstart Python course

Updates:

• 13.00, Did Vim Anki and used touch typing there too
• 14.45, 15 mins of gtypist. Loving it now, despite the pain it causes :)
• 15.00, Beginning Lutz Chapter 4, NUmbers in Action
  1. Overloading and Polymorphism, Python itself overloads some opertaors such that they perform different actions depending on the type of buily-in objects being processed.
     For example, the + operator performs addition when applied to numbers but concatenation when applied to sequence objects like strings and lists.
     This property is usually called polymorphism
• 22.00, Chapter 6 of the Lutz book done. It’s a small one called A Dynamic Interlude, but it cleared so many huhs for me.

Updates:

• 7p, Getting better with gtypist.
• 8.15p, Done with Vim
• 8.20p, No Python Apps tonight
• 22.33, Just understood the difference between generic sequence operations and methods (my aha for the day!)
  You can run generic sequence operation across the core object types. For e.g. I can run the len function on strings, or numbers or lists.
  Methods, are object specific. I can only run numeric methods on numbers and string methods on strings.
  This probably is why you run generic operations in front of a type, like type(s) and methods as a .whatever like s.isupper.
  Lutz shows me another quick rule of thumb; when you run the dir function on an object it should list the generic operations with underscores e.g. __len__ and methods just show up as plain attributes later in the listing e.g. swapcase
• 11.57p, Done with Chapter 4 of the Lutz book.
  • Final big insight for future reference.
    Polymorphism means that the meaning of an operation (like a +) depends on the objects being operated upon. This turns out to be a key idea (perhaps the key idea) behind using Python well—not censtraining code to specific types makes that code automatically applicable to many types.

Given up on the #100daysofcode for now.
Current strategy is to …

1. Read theory (Lutz)
2. Practice programs
3. Ask friends to give me more programs.

Updates

• 2p, Restarting the Lutz book. Got lost.
• 2.15p, Just realised why I love Vim. Vim makes me want to write.
• 3.20p, Also realised I’d bought myself a beginner Talk Python to Me, course a while back. I could use this for point 2 above.
• 6.30p, Two baby apps done.
• 10.45p, Did chapters 1 & 2 of the Lutz Book.
• 11p, Did 10 minutes of Gtypist. As you can see below, there’s a lo–oong way to go :P

My school grades did not reflect it though.

And these days, my consulting solutions have been top notch, and yet, I struggle to sharpen the saw.

What gives?

It struck me today, as I finished watching some Python videos along my struggling Python journey, that I was understanding the concepts much better than I had in the past few months.

And then it hit me, like a ton of bricks!

There are two aspects to learning effectively (for me) …

1. I need to vary my reading and use a lot of sources.
2. I need to practice lots to gain fluency.

Lack of practice in my cocky youth led to me knowing much, but since I had no fluency, my grades suffered.
And since I’m not making an effort to gain various points of view now, I struggle to make syntopical connections and my learning suffers.

So in essence, if I make a concerted effort (in a structured, disciplined way) to read more, cast my net a little wider and practice a lot, I should be able to whoop 18 year old Jason’s ass!

Wish me luck!

Lessson learnt.
Switched to periodic rysnc via a cron job.

Nothing else done today.
Still sick as a dog.

Watched a couple of Python tutorials

Charted out a plan for the Lutz book. 2 Chapters or a 100 pages a day, whichever is less.
This should let me finish the book in 20 days. Trying to figure out a way to structurally practice tiny problems too.
That #100daysofcode research is still pending.
Will hopefully do it tomorrow.
Have a full day at work today.

Can move about with slight ease and copy & paste with lots of unease.
Practice makes perfect, I suppose.

Plan for the day, since I’m home sick?
Well I’m a gonna swing for the fences and finish the Lutz book.

Will update at night.

P.S. Bonus todo
Got to see if I can do a #100daysofcode run with Python.
If I can, I ought to start.

Update (10.30) – Ok, huge overstimation. Lutz will take time.
Looking at doing Lutz chapters as my #100daysofcode challenge.
Update (11.00) - I like this. talking to myself.
Wonder if I should move Nikola and run it from the server itself, so I can ssh and use it from anywhere?
Update (18.00) - Well, the day was a bust. Slept all day. Did nothing :)

• Start doing 20 hours of VIM.
• Finish another Lutz chapter.

Will update progress by days’ end.

Updates:
2pm. Got myself a VIM Anki deck.

10pm.

• Sadly no Lutz today.
• Practiced Vim all day.
• Finished Painless Vim.
• Changed my theme.
• Recomposed this post in Vim
• Changed my terminal editor from code to vim, so that all new posts will now be “Vim Powered!”

Also, ran across this inspirational post yesterday.
This along with Kushal’s (always generous) advice¹ that I should start tinkering with stuff, makes me wonder if I should also do the #100DaysOfCode challenge, with Python.
After all, it seems to have done the trick for my writing.
I no longer have writers block :)

Will see if it is doable.
À bientôt!

Alright, speed reading Lutz is a little bit of an over statement :P
But four chapters done and working towards finishing it.
Love the comprehensive treatment of Python.
Would love to see an update to the book, since Mark’s such a wonderful teacher, but that doesn’t seem likely.
Mark does religiously update here though.
This will always serve as an excellent foundational resource.
Would have loved to learn from Mark in person. The book is a close second!

Rebuilding it over and over was exciting in the beginning and then it sudddenly began to grate on my nerves.

So I decided to put in my twenty hours after my break and learn Ansible.

In my case,

• I setup a barebones server running Bionic Beaver and configured it for ssh access
• Everything from then on, was controlled by the YAML playbook I was building step by step
• I updated the machine
• I configured three users
• I setup UFW & Fail2Ban
• NGINX was next
• I configured my 4 little play subdomains
• And finally configured Letsencrypt and enabled SSL

And that’s about all I wanted from my basic machine so far.
Running the script start to finish takes about 30 mins and I have a machine ready to go!
Doing all that by hand is fraught with errors and takes me nearly half a day.

Every other task I need done now, I’ll start doing via Ansible.

There’s obviously lots more to learn. The playbook (my recording) started from nothing and has now grown to an unwieldy 200 odd lines.
I can hive them off into other files and call them seperately.
I can optimize what I’ve written, and make it portable, so that I can setup any server I wish, not just mine.

But all that is for later.

I did this, so I could have a machine to trash and rebuild quickly.
Now that I have one, Python, here I come.

P.S.
It also gave me a small sense of how coding actually works.
It was slow steady progress.
Building a bit, testing, iterating, tinkering and playing.
And at the end of the day, I have something that I can call my own, something I built and something that makes my work easier.
By Jove, this is going to be fun!

I realised I’m overthinking this and I should just put my head down and do a little everyday.
I realised the the basic concepts aren’t that many and I just need to get fluent with them.
I just assumed that it was all so vast that I couldn’t wrapt my head around it.

Maybe it is, but everything has a seed.
And the seed it small.
Andf it contains everything the mighty oak, would ever need to grow.

Back in the saddle. Learning Ansible so that I do not have to keep doing things over and over on my box.

Day 0

“This is awesome! This is so awesome!”, these were was my reactions as I boarded my first flight to Delhi.

I was having trouble finding proper accommodation.
Kushal, Sayan and Chandan helped me a lot there.
I finally got the honour of  bunking with Sayan, Subho and Rtnpro. This made for an unforgettable experience!
I landed and directly went to JNU convention center. I met the whole  Red Hat intern gang. It was so much fun meeting them all.
I had proposed Pagure for the Dev Sprints and I roped in Vivek as collaborator and partner in crime.

Imagine my metal agony and tension when the sprint started and there was no sign of Vivek or Saptak. Saptak is a FOSSASIA contributor and Vivek  contributes to Pagure with me.
Finally it was my turn to talk about Pagure on stage. It was all the things I feared. It was nerve wrackingly terrifying.
And yet … it was beautiful!
The experience and the energy gave me a new high and made me confident.
We got a lot of young and new contributors, and we tried to guide them and make them send at least one PR.  One of them persisted and made actually made a PR which got readily merged.

I met lots of other contributors and mentors!
Everything sounded fun! Each and every project was simply amazing.
I wished I could contribute to and help all of them.
We also met Paul, who writes code for PyCharm, and had an animated discussion over Vim v/s PyCharm.

Finally the day ended with us, (Vivek, Sayan, Subho, Saptak and me) going out to dinner. I bunked with Sayan and Subho and we hacked all night long. I was configuring my Weechat and was trying all the plugins available and trust me there are a lot of them.

Day 1

I was a session chair in one of the lecture rooms and it was crazy!
From learning to write firmware for a drone, to using generators to write multi-threaded programs to working with the salt stack, it was a rich varied, mind bending experience

The food was really good but the line for food was “pythonic!”

There were a lot of stalls put up and I went to all of them chatted with the folks manning the stalls. My favorite one was PyCharm because Paul promised me to teach me some neat tricks.
The Pyladies booth was very informative and were responsible for making attendees aware about certain social issues and about getting women in tech.

We had two keynotes by Baishampayan Ghose and Van Lindberg. Both of the keynotes were so varied, yet so amazing, they made me look at technology from a different view point altogether.

One really cool part of such a conference is the Open Spaces and Lightning talks. I attended a few and I found them enthralling. I was so eagerly waiting for DGPLUG’s famous staircase meeting. I met Kushal’s mentor, Sartaj and he gave us deep insights into the whats and whys and wherefores of the importance of contributing to open source. My big takeaway from his time with us, was that even if one’s code is not used by anyone, they should still be writing code for the love of it.

After this we went out for DGPLUG/Volunteers dinner at BBQ Nation. It was quite an eventful evening ;)

Day 2 

The last day of conference, I remember having thoughts about how a programming language translates into philosophy and how that philosophy unites a diverse nation like India.
While that feeling of inclusivity was amazing, there was also a touch of sadness, the melancholy of parting from friends who meet just once a year.
I could actually now relate all IRC nicks with their faces. It brings a lot more to the table. It made them all relatable, more … human.

And at last we all returned to the humdrum of our normal lives with a promise to meet again. I still wonder at how technology creates camaraderie between people from all nooks and corners of life. At how it relates a school teacher to a product engineer. It makes  me feel that Python is more than just a programming language; it’s a unique medium that unites people and gives them power to make things right.

With this joyful thought fhackdroid signs out!

Happy Hacking!