W1 - Off to a Good Start

Progress has been a bit slower than expected, partly because I have to balance learning with my daily job and partly because I keep wandering off to explore more—though that’s a good problem to have!

Last Week’s Progress:

• Went through Learn Python in Y Minutes and completed sections 1 to 6.
• Worked through section 2.3 of Practical Python Programming.
• Set up a more complex full-stack project involving multiple repositories, databases, Docker, Redis—definitely out of my depth, but a great introduction to more advanced software engineering concepts.

Goals for This Week:

• Work through to section 4 of Practical Python Programming.
• Start writing programs from The Big Book of Small Python Projects.

Looking forward to another productive week!

W0 - Begin Again

My programming skills are quite rusty, and over the next six weeks, I’m committing to fixing that. In my day-to-day job, the tool of choice is Excel for working through different kinds of data. Occasionally, I write Python scripts to help with the processing pipeline, but it’s not a skill I use regularly.

The plan over the next six weeks is to work through the following resources:

• A brief tour of Python’s syntax and features: Learn Python in Y minutes parts 1-5 and Practical Python Programming chapters 1-4.
• The Big Book of Small Python Projects by Al Sweigart — hand-on exercises to think, code, and learn different ways to approach problem-solving in Python.
• Part 1 of Object-Oriented Python by Irv Kalb — I never quite grasped OOP in my college classes; here’s to giving it another shot.
• Beyond the Basic Stuff with Python by Al Sweigart — to get more context on working with Python professionally.

To ensure I don’t delegate understanding as I learn, I’m setting the following constraints on using LLM assistants:

• I will leverage LLMs in tasks that aid in the learning process: clarifying concepts, code reviews, pair programming…
• I will type all code by hand; turning off all copilots for now. As Grant Slatton aptly puts it, “quantity has a quality all of its own… as a junior engineer, there’s simply no substitute for getting the first 100K lines of code under your belt.”