Coding after college: Week 1 + Week 2

Taken when I was going in to talk about an internship

Re-introduction:

Hi, I’m Alex, and the first time that I introduced myself I was a Junior Computer Science student attending Georgia State University, but I can now say with confidence and happiness that I have officially graduated from university during Summer 2019!

Since graduating I have created a schedule to not only apply for jobs, but also to start doing one thing that I felt like I didn’t really explore as much as I wanted in college, programming. Sounds crazy, right? A Computer Science major not really exploring programming? What the heck were you doing, then? *Stares intently. Well I can tell you that I was programming, a lot, and studying a lot, but I always felt that something was missing. I never felt like I grasped the confidence to make something just for fun, or how to think about what I am building — the various components of it, and the purpose that it will serve. So I am using that time right now to learn and practice.

How am I going to practice and “re-learn” programming?

I am going to teach myself to become a better programmer by doing a couple of things each week:

1. Working on coding challenges through “homework” and “small problems” each week.
2. Re-learning and practicing a data structure.
3. Re-making my portfolio site from scratch.

I am doing the above through GitHub repositories “A Python a Day” (link below) for practicing programming, command line things, and data structures,“A Website a Week” (will be created this week) for working on fun websites that I come up with, and YouTube, notes, and a text editor for practicing data structures.

I make sure to use ideas that seem interesting to me or fun/funny to keep interest and to reduce burnout. My ultimate goal is to create things for someone, including myself, to use that may do simple or complex things, but is fun and easy to use. I want to ensure that what I create can solve some problem for someone out there, ranging from my parents to a friend of mine to a potential client that my team is working with wherever I may work.

Week 1: What went on

If I were to sum up week 1 in a phrase or a word it would be “fun” because I not only felt like I was having fun with programming, but I got a notification from Georgia State University saying that I am officially a graduate and that I should expect my degree to be at my doorstep in a couple weeks, it was my birthday, and I was starting the journey into job hunt land, which is a new territory for me.

This week was fueled with creative programming project ideas and an eagerness to learn about the amazing Python language and programming as a whole.

Week 1: What did I learn

I learned a lot about the Python language including hash maps and how Python implements them through dictionaries.

My “homework” assignment taught me a couple of things like:

• Input in Python 2.7 has to be taken with raw_input
• You can traverse a dictionary in many ways depending on the value that you want to retrieve; for my case it was to traversing the keys to return the value.
• Dictionaries are interesting and cool data structures that I have barely scratched the surface of.
• I should be an adult and update to Python 3.

My “small assignment”, which was surprisingly tougher than my homework assignment, actually taught me the most about the Python “flow”. It made me thing about where I put my functions, what I want them to do, and what I want to get from them. One huge thing that I learned was that there are some things that Python does not have innately. For instance, a switch statement, which would have worked better with the flavor selection, but I did learn that there is a trick which I will probably use in a later program.

In conclusion, this week taught me that programming is not something that you do for an assignment due at 11:59 PM, but an amazing tool that allows you to craft things that you may never have imagined would be able to function. When I program now I feel like I am doing something and having fun! Given all things that may feel smooth or rough, I have realized that this is what the journey is supposed to be.

Week 2: What went on

The word I would use to describe Week 2 is definitely “struggle”. During this week I feel like I struggled to get a grip on how I wanted to structure my goals on top of having a really bad cold. In short, I felt a little lost this week because I was overbooking myself with daily goals and not doing anything fun or really concussive to my original plan, which was to learn, have fun, program, and do things that make you smile.

Did I give up?

Nope. Puh-leez. Why would I? The journey is supposed to have smooth and rough sections. When we trip up on a rock and skin our knee, acting as if a boulder has fallen on us pinning us to the ground forever is not the way to go about things. What determines our dedication and success along the journey is how we react to the challenges and obstacles in our way early on, even if those obstacles look a lot like us.

Defeating myself now is giving up on myself when I work with a framework in Python, or when I start working with JavaScript, or because the API is returning the wrong thing. We are going to have challenges, and I am thankful for mine and what I will learn as I overcome them.

How did I pivot?

I took a step back and remembered why I started this journey and what I enjoy about programming, took a break, programmed my homework assignment, and took another break to reset.

How will I attack week 3 and every week beyond?

1. Getting back to having fun with whatever I am doing.
2. Making realistic and manageable daily goals.
3. Listening to myself.
4. Exercising and treating myself and my health better.

Ultimately, I will go about the rest of my journey knowing that an elephant is eaten in parts not whole.

Week 2: What did I learn from programming?

My homework was to create a Base-10 to any base below 10 converter, and it taught me quite a bit. The things that I learned were:

1. I need to take a step back because I have a tendency to overthink my programs.
2. Python uses lists rather than arrays
3. .join and map() are very interesting to use
4. I have to do some conversions to use certain things such as my input numbers, which I had to convert to ints.
5. Python has a funny way of reversing strings and I have a lot to learn in that department.

Week 1+2 conclusion

In conclusion, both weeks have taught me a lot, not only about Python, but myself as well. I look forward to continuing this journey and learning more about creating things through programming, whether it be through Python, JavaScript, or whatever language that I may need to use or find interesting.

Links to my Github and portfolio website

• A Python a Day Github: https://github.com/A-Mitch/apythonaday
• Portfolio site: https://a-mitch.github.io

Thanks for reading,

Alex