Today is a short post. I worked a lot. Did not get much work or progress in. Life got in the way. Hope tomorrow is a better day. I did do, 2 hours of work though, and I did learn a lot. So there’s that. Until tomorrow … P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list! Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe! P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit. ...
Another day of doing only Django. Not that I’m complaining. Finishing up this Django course is my priority. Followed by PostgreSQL and Data Structures and Algorithms. I just have to do them step by step, one after another. What I learnt in Django land I like calling it Django land. Reminds me of Tarantino’s Django and Candyland. I learnt all about many to many database relationships and how they’re done with models in Django. They’re a logical extension of one to many relationships. It’s like one of those who know who games. I know Carol. Carol knows Amelia. And so Carol is my through table, my join table, my junction table. I can request things of Amelia through Carol. That in a nutshell is what it is like. I realise that all these complicated terms I feared are actually succinct names for simple, yet long winded processes or things. I’m going to practice all this tomorrow morning. Heuristic, whenever I see repeated strings vertically, I ought to be thinking databases for efficient storage. Heuristic, whenever I see multiple things relating to multiple other things, I ought to be thinking many to many models/relationships (many books to a genre, many genres to a book, an author with multiple books, a book with multiple authors) Use integers for primary keys. Integers are fast. I now love the folk who designed and built Django. The more I learn about its innards, the more I realise there is no Django magic. Just back breaking hard work and lots of thought put into building this beautiful edifice over the years. Makes me appreciate learning Django, even more. Focus Follow Up aka How did I do with focus today? Did seven, 30 minute sessions of Django and one aborted session Had a lot of housework today and still managed to wrangle 3 and half hours of deep work. Writing notes, seems to be helping. I get my quizzes right the first time around. Deliberate practice and focus are not easy, that’s for sure. I keep looking at the clock. And then I keep moaning about how time passes too slowly when I am struggling with stuff. Also noticed that whenever I start working on something tough, my mind gets really uncomfortable and wants to do everything else, but focus on the problem and do the work. I want to suddenly call people I haven’t spoken to in ages, check my mail, my messages, peek at the fediverse 😂 I resist. And tell myself, I just have to hold on for 20 more minutes 😂 I serendipitously came across this tweet, just a few minutes ago, which tells me I am not alone :) Writing code is often a constant struggle against distraction. — Joy of Clojure This focus is now bleeding into other areas of my life. I am slowing down and doing other stuff, slowly, intentionally. My mind feels like it is slowly expanding as if it was in a vise. It feels a bit more relaxed, a bit more freer Here’s to showin’ up! ...
Let’s get on with today’s log! I studied only Django today. Was plagued with rains and power cuts and family stuff. Managed to work well and patiently though. What I learnt in Django land. Owned Rows, that opened my eyes into another dimension to begin with. While I knew that Django supports multiple users, it struck home today, that I was the one to write all the code that supported all those users. All the exercises so far, were just build a view, show some data. And now I realise, Oh! I cannot let Tom edit Jerry’s cheese details, nor can Spike get into Tom’s house. I need to be the one that guards against all that. Owned rows are one way I can do this. They will let logged in users edit or delete rows that belong to them only. Not the others. I subclassed stuff, which let me drill OOP concepts like inheritance a bit more. Finally, I learnt about DRY in action where I let the parent classes do all the heavy lifting, while I wrote a tiny class that let me tweak stuff just the way I liked it. Finally, finally, I learnt the amount of work Django saves me and just how much power is there under the hood. Focus Follow Up aka How did I fare today and how do I feel now at the end of the day? Did eight, 30 minute sessions of learning Django. Had three aborted sessions, when I got ridiculously distracted. If you want to know, why I abort and start over, I kinda go over this, in this post. So worked about the same time (or less) as I did yesterday. I feel like I learnt a bit more, than I did yesterday. I’ve begun writing scratch notes as I look at the videos. This makes it more slowgoing, but I internalise stuff a more. I think. I’ll see if this helps. Energy wise, this is still sustainable. I feel good still at the end of the day. Not drained and exhausted. Also I think I’m getting the grasp of this. I keep pausing the videos and then trying to predict stuff. I find myself being right, more and more frequently. Today was the first time I yelled at Dr. Chuck for typing in the model name wrong 😂 I only wish I had begun much, much, much earlier in life, when all these things were beginning and then grown with the Django project. I wish I was not as intimidated about programming being the domain of ‘smart’ people, when I was young. I wish I had more patience, as I traverse what seems like a never ending road of learning with no end in sight, with new things to learn, every half a mile. I wish I could get over this big mountain of basic fundamentals with a snap of my fingers. But I can’t. So I’ll do the next best thing. Show up. And do the work. P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list! Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe! P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit. ...
Today, I did not quite care how much progress I made. Instead I focussed on getting my focus periods in, like I described yesterday. It’s about an hour earlier than when I usually call it a day. And yet, now that I am checking, I have ‘worked’ fewer actual hours than usual. And I have gotten a bit of exercise and housework done too! (This does not usually happen on a normal study day) ...
Hopefully, for the next couple of months at least. As amazing as Dr. Chuck and Brian Yu and Reuven Lerner are, I find myself falling asleep as I learn web development. I look at the videos, I seem to understand things, and then I zone out. A while later, 30 minutes have passed, three videos are over and I am wondering, just what the heck Dr. Chuck is on about. ...
Like I mentioned the other day, Django is driving me batty! Ok, I cannot completely blame Django. A dental procedure has left me in quite a bit of pain and unable to focus. So I was wondering what else I could do, instead of Django and decided I’d learn PostgreSQL. I was tickled pink when I read that Postgres is actually Post Ingres. I am old enough to remember Ingres databases that ran on computers I supported as a junior hardware engineer in the late 90s. I was warned not to ever touch the database machine unless I was supervised :P I also attended seminars for another ‘Post Ingres’ database called NonstopSQL in the early oughts when I worked with Compaq as a support engineer for their laptops. Engineers would have open sessions. But what did a boy servicing laptops have to do with Tandem machines? How did they let me attend? That I will never know. Just that I found them fascinating :) ...