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Learning a new skill this year? Putting your mind to learn programming? Looking to wow folks with your newly acquired French? A professional exam, you want to ace? And yet, as you look back over years of broken resolutions, you think it might not be worth it? That you aren’t cut out for learning physics on your own if you wanted to? That you are “slow”? Maybe that’s just because you haven’t realised that learning itself is a skill? That you need to learn, how to learn? ...

Michel de Montaigne was a year younger than me (thirty eight), when he inscribed this on the wall in his library … In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, anniversary of his birth, Michel de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned Virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life now more than half run out. If the fates permit, he will complete this abode, this sweet ancestral retreat; and he has consecrated it to his freedom, tranquility, and leisure. ...

Today was cautious fun :) What did I do today? I got a rough journal working switched to vscode as my programming editor (still using emacs for my other writing.) will move back to emacs when I have the time to sharpen the saw, because I want an editor that I can use 30 years from now. Right now though, I cannot afford to yak shave. What did I learn? ...

Lots of new concepts today … What did I do today? Watched the videos on how to make a mini journal app. What did I learn? Today was a doozy I learnt about lists, more conditionals, how to use files for storage & write to a disk independent of what os I’m using, how the main() function kicks things off, and how to use different files for different parts of a program to keep things cleaner and more organised. While I began well, I’ve gotten thoroughly confused as the class went on. I know these things individually (I think), but the putting it all together, feels like drawing the rest of the fucking owl. Hope things get clearer tomorrow, as I begin to actually write the program. ...

Today I really understood what deliberate practice was all about. What did I do today? Wrote and ran the birthday app I watched yesterday. It’s a simple app that asks you for your birthday and then tells you, how many days to or since your birthday. What did I learn? I spent at least 30 minutes hunting down and looking up errors, caused by a tiny typo. I ought to be more careful. On the other hand, while I know the basic syntax, my python vocabulary isn’t large enough yet. I still need to see what my 80/20 ratio of fluency to lookup will be. Right now I am looking up everything. I am beginning to think of programming as cooking. It’s a really good analogy and it makes programming a lot less intimidating. And finally I actually figured what deliberate practice was all about. I worked at a hard enough task that was just out of reach. As opposed to times in the past where stuff was too easy or frighteningly hard. This is a really good space to work in. My head still hurts, but it hurts in a good way 🙂 Onwards … ...

Happy Deepavali folks :) Had an easy day today. The slog yesterday paid off! What did I do today? Finished the Guess the number game app. Watched videos for the next one, the Birthday Countdown App. What did I learn? Have to be wary with while loops and where I choose to exit them. Also I should always initialise them with some value that is not in the answer / solution range. I can break my code into functional pieces. This piece of code doing one thing and that one doing that. These little mini programs of code are called … functions. I felt like Hansa when I realised this. When you ask the user for any input, it’ll always come in as a string. You need to convert it, to the format you need. Onwards … ...