Day 1 is an disaster of fantastical proportions.
I did lots of stuff.
But I got nothing of consequence done.
Save one big thing.
I managed to buckle down and study for six hours.
That counts as a win, a big one in my book.
Will hopefully get more done tomorrow.
If you are following this blog, the days might soon seem out of sync.
That’s because I’ve decided that Wednesday, Thursday and Friday are my days of study. Monday & Tuesday are for work, while Satuday and Sunday are for home and family.
I need to practice what I preach and have margins and boundaries in my life.
French
- Created cards and a review sesion
Python Problem
- I decide to tackle this first thing in the morn and sank like a stone.
- I yak shaved for 2 hours (git issues, setting up a dedicated desktop space for study, rsync issues, syncthing issues, crontab issues, more git issues)and then took nearly another hour trying to remember things and then by the time I had some idea of how to tackle the issue, it was lunch time. Hopefully better luck tomorrow
The MITx, 6.00.1x, Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python course
- I am hopelessly behind and playing catch up.
- Already missed the deadline for the week one exercises.
- Hopefully will be all caught up by this time next week.
I learnt
- that iterables are things that can be counted. like beads in a string, or on a rosary.
- strings are a form of iterable.
- Bisection searches to find square roots are much more efficient than having to go slowly guessing our way up.
- I should not compare floating point numbers (e.g. test for equality). Their internal representations might just be subtly different. Instead use the absolute value of the difference of the two floats.
abs(x-y)instead ofx==y - Start with a basic set of code, check to see what it runs on, and then see if small changes to the code can solve other similar problems or improve the efficacy of existing ones. (Newton-Rhapson better to find roots than Bisection guess better than incremental exhaustive guessing)