Programming

My homepage lists my new career shift as “This is me, attempting to reinvent myself as a journeyman programmer. (aiming at craftsmanship)” I’ve never warmed to the term coder. For some reason, it never meshed with the way I thought about my new career and the work I wanted to do. And I couldn’t quite articulate just how I thought they were different. Today as I began reading The Secret Life of Programs though, I found author Jonathan E. Steinhart’s already done the hard work giving me a lovely explicit definition that I cannot better, even if I tried endlessly. Here’s his take … ...

Meta post. More than Django itself, I am beginning the phase of my journey, where now I write code and install programs and do all the things. Am committing 2 hours to this daily, on weekdays along with a tiny what did I learn post. I am beginning with Django itself, and if I have difficulties with any underlying concepts, I will quickly dive down and write code to understand those. Learning along with Brad Traversy’s Python Django Dev To Deployment. It’s a bit old, but I like the way he teaches. And to make sure I am not cargo culting, I am doing this with Django 3 (the course has Django 2) ...

Here’s putting in some thought into what I’ll do this #CNC2021. Their first mail asked me to reflect on … Determine what has worked. Figured out the basics of data structures and algorithms Figured out how to write in Python Figured out how write my own code. Took a lot of work and persistence. Took a lot of grit. Realised that I’m not “slow.” I just have a hard life and could only put in fewer hours compared to the folks who zoomed past me. Determine what has NOT worked. Just what I said above but in a slightly negative manner. This takes a lot of grit. I need to figure out how to stop bare knuckling it and do it sustainably. I’m dog slow currently. I need to look up everything and I get distracted when I do that. I keep comparing myself to others and get overwhelmed What are your long-term goals? Get a job by accomplishing, in the next 6-12 months, what I listed in my introductory post. I need to do all sorts of basic exercises in the languages I am learning (Python/HTML/CSS/JavaScript) I need to find and contribute to open source projects, to get a feel of how it is to work with folks and to understand how this whole world functions I need to write toy projects for myself. What are your short-term goals? By the end of this challenge, I want to get into the rhythm of writing code across all the three goals I listed up above I just need to see steady forward progress

Enough learning. I now have to drill what I’ve learnt over the past few weeks and months by writing lots of code. Been noodling around with what that might look like in my head. Here’s what I got. After tentatively coding up stuff in a couple of domains and after a short chat with a friend, I realise I love writing code for the web. I love reading. I love to write on my blog. I love that with just a few keypresses, my words can be read by anyone on the web, no gatekeeper required. I would love to write code to enable this for more people. I would love to play and tinker and push at the boundaries of this domain. This intersection of all this is web development. Ergo, I want to become a web developer. ...

Whenever Emacs saves a file, it makes a backup of the original. So if I had a file.txt and I make changes and save it, Emacs firsts backs up the original to file.txt~. While I love this functionality, and it has saved me from a pickle more than once, I don’t love the way my folders get polluted with ~ files all over the place. My blog’s drafts folder had hundreds of these. ...

Could not focus much on programming today. So decided on doing things with Python programs. Nikola Upgrade I use Nikola to generate both my websites. It is an extremely easy to use, no fuss static site generator, which is easy on my server’s resources. Version 8.1.2 was released a few hours ago and I hopped on and installed it. I follow a slightly unconventional upgrade path, because I was terrified of breaking my server in the early days, when I was still learning about how to go about installing things on servers. ...