Being laid up sick in bed is never fun. Yet, serendipitously, it was the being laid up, that gave me time to focus and complete my first Python program.
We were to make a project, that combined what we’d learnt so far at DGPLUG.
So to me that was:
- Markdown (or RST; I chose Markdown)
- Git (my bugbear. I still can’t quite wrap my head around it)
- and Python.
So I created a spanking new repo for my crazy, one off projects at Github. Created a license, because, well because Anwesha says you ought to, and even shows you how to. (and it’s generally a good thing any way :)
That, out of the way, I used my ninja Markdown skills (honed by writing here :P) to whip up a little README
And then started the slog.
While I have been learning the basics of Python, like a child learning shapes; moulding what I have learnt into some semblance of a logical thing is darned hard.
I’d read somewhere about the Golden Mean and it’s relation to the Fibonacci sequence, so I thought I’d write a mini text adventurish romp as my first project.
It took me the whole day! I typed and it did not run. I fixed typos. I fixed colons. I fixed quotes. I tore my hair out. And I typed some more. And I fixed some more. Oh, and all the while, I was trying to push it up to Github as well. (with varying degrees of success)
But in a lot of ways, it reminded me of the time, I spent learning photography and basic editing. I was moving sliders and figuring curves and creating needlessly large TIFFs all over Lightroom
And gm.py reminds me of the first time a photo came out right. I don’t quite know how I did it then and I don’t quite know how I did it now. The recipe’s ugly. But the photo looked good. And the program does run.
Which brings me to how I look at a photo today. I can instinctively tell, what needs cropping, if I need to make white balance adjustments, whether the exposure needs tweaking, if I can pull detail out of the shadows. And my newbie-ness wasn’t that long ago.
I wish myself the same level of competence when it comes to programming. Onward!
You can find the repo and my first program here.