After The First Week Was Completed

Wow, how quickly two weeks are passing by while you’re busy enjoying every hour you can with code, technology, people, and for once, the weather. I’m even more surprised to see that I was able to maintain a small git commit streak (10 days, which was cut yesterday, more on that below) which is damn incredible considering that I spent 90% of my time outside of work away from a keyboard. I told myself that I would try my hardest to still learn and implement what I could while travelling, opting to go deep into the documentation (which I will include from what I can put from the various Git commits and search history below) and learning what it means to write Pythonic code. Still, progress and lines of code is better than none whatsoever. One helpful fact which made learning easier was my dedication to only learning Python 3.6, which removes a lot of 2.1 related spec and documentation. This allowed me to maintain an easier to target breadth of documents and information while travelling.

Jumping into Different Lanes

More so, I found myself trapped in an interesting predicament which I put myself in for the first week. Not knowing where to start, or how much time online challenges would take in the later hours, I opted to decide just as I walked toward the keyboard ‘What am I building today?’. This means that everyday of the challenge, I’ve walked in on a blank canvas thinking ‘Do I want to play with an API, learn how to read the file system? etc.’ This has been a zig-zag way of exposing myself to various scopes and processes which Python is capable of. I love the challenge, but I also fear the direction would lead me towards a rocky foundation of niche exercises, pick-and-choose projects and an understanding limited in scope. Learning how to to make API requests with the Requests module was a great introduction to PIP, pipenv, and 3rd party modules. Likewise dictating the scope of what I want to learn that day made each challenge a great mix of new, old, and reinforcing of a different scope compared to yesterday.

For the second week, I wanted to try some coding challenges found online such as HackerRanks (Thanks Margaryta for sharing), FreeCodeAcademy’s Front-End, Back-End, and Data Science courses, and SoloLearn challenges on mobile. Curious of the output and differences between my previous and current week’s goals, I came to the following thoughts after becoming a 3 star Python Developer on Hacker Rank (an hour or so per day this week’s worth):

• Preset Challenges are better thought out, designed to target specific scopes instead of a hodge-podge concept.
• You can rate them based on difficulty, meaning that you’re able to gauge and understand your current standing with a language.
• It’s fun to take someones challenge, and see how you’d accomplish it. There’s many times where I saw solutions posted on forums (after researching how to do N) which I thought I’d never had brainstormed, were too verbose, were well beyond my understanding, or too simple or stagnated where the logic could be summed up in a cleaner chained solution.

Experience So Far

Whereas I fretted and stressed over time and deadlines, this challenge’s culture advocates for progress over completion. I still opt for completion, but knowing that code is code, instead of grades being grades is a relieving change of pace which also makes the approach and implementation much more fun. I’ve opted for the weekends to be slightly more relaxed, not heavily focused on code and more and concept and ideals (perhaps due to my constant traveling?), which also makes my weekday related challenges fantastic stepping stones which play with the weekend’s research.

Learning Python has never been an item high up on my priorities, and only through David Humphrey’s persuasion did I add it to the top of my list -knowing that it would benefit quite a bit of my workflow in the future-, and opt to learn it at the start of the challenge. From the perspective of someone who’s background in the past two years revolved around CSS, JS, and Java, Python is a beautifully simple and fun language to learn.

Simple yet powerful, minimalistic yet full-featured. I love the paradox and contradictions which are produced simply by describing it alone. The syntax reminds me quite a bit of newer Swift syntax, which also makes the relation easier to memorize. I also gather that from an outsider’s perspective, that the challenge also shows growth in the developer (regardless of how they opt to do the challenge) through the body and quality of work they produce throughout the span of the marathon.

An interesting tidbit, is that I’ve noticed my typical note taking fashion is very Pythonic in formatting / styling, and you can ask my peers / friends who’ve seen my notes. It’s been like this since High school with only subtle changes throughout the years. Coincidence? Have I found the language which resonates with my inner processes? In all seriousness I just found it hilarious how often I’d start to write python syntax in Markdown files, or even Ruby files yet, when writing my own notes the distinction was minimal.

What About The Commit Streak?

Honestly, the perfectionist in me; one quick to challenge itself where possible was the most anxious about losing the streak, especially since as a developer it seemed to me as one way to boast and measure your value. I enjoyed maintaining the streak, but I also had to be honest with my current priorities and time to myself. Quite frankly, it’s not healthy to lose an hour sleep to produce a measure of code you can check in just for a green square when you’ve already spent a good few hours reading Bytes of Python on the subway for example, or devoted time to learning more through YouTube tutorials on your lunch break. I thought that I’d use GitHub and commits as a way of keeping honest with myself and my peers, but after reading quite a few different experiences and post-200 days types of blogs, I’m starting to see why most advocate for Twitter as their logging platform. Green squares are beautiful, but they are only so tangible.

Whereas I can promise that I learned something while traveling, perhaps using SoloLearn to complete challenges, I cannot easily port over this experience and visual results to Git to validate progress. I suppose that is where Twitter was accepted as the standard, since it’s community is vastly more accessible and also accepting that not everything is quantifiable through Python files. Instead, saying that you read this, did that, learned this, and experimented with that is as equally accepted as day-12-hacker-rank-challenges-04.py with it’s 100+ line count.

This doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop commiting to GitHub for the challenge, or that I’ll stop trying to maintain a commit streak either; it simply means that I can accept it being broken by a day where I cannot be at my computer within reasonable time. It won’t bother me to have a gap between the squares once in a while.

I’ve seen friends enjoying the challenge for similar and vastly differences too, and I highly recommend giving it a try for those who are still hesitant.