So where to begin, its been over 5 months since my last post at which time I had such high hopes and running on a great uplifting feeling of the possibilities and the excitement of learning again. But things started to fall apart in every other aspect at the time and my depression took a nosedive and I hit some of the lowest points in my life.
I was at the point of wondering when I would ever have time to do the things I wanted or needed, how life is just constant counting of time before going to work and then again after on how much time I have in my life before I go back again in the morning and delve deeper into the darkness getting closer to the point of no return. I found myself no longer thinking about coding or the journey or any of that , and when I did I would then hate on myself for not working on it daily and spiral further into depression. So after taking control of things and working with a therapist to turn things around lead to taking some much needed time off work to work on myself.
After about a month and a half of getting my head straight again I find myself happy again and in a much better place even than I was deluding myself back in Jan and Feb. So I am ready to get back on the horse so to speak and put this time off into myself and put the pedal to the metal with learning to code! Failure is not an option this time, both my sanity and my life depends on change and expansion.
When I left off I had been working on the path starting with Responsive Web Design on freecodecamp which at the time had been fun but I was still constantly struggling in my head if I was wasting time with starting with that since I had no intention of doing anything with web design going forward but stuck with the path. What I would really like to do is learn python first and then go from there, I feel that there is more options and opportunity through python than I could get by going through all of Web Design and JavaScript and then eventually getting to python was going to take far longer than I wanted and worried that I would lose interest this way. I do plan on going back and picking up where I left off with Web Design on freecodecamp eventually but python first.
So with that said I did a little research on other options other than freecodecamp as looking at what they offered I was worried it may not be the direction I needed. So I found a free course on udemy that was recommended called "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python Programming" by Al Sweigart. This one is geared towards if you never knew code or python, this seemed like a good option to have to work with but I also wanted to continue to find more. I then found a course through Cisco called "Python Essentials 1" this one was also free and provided a "badge" upon completion that you can put on your resume. Not sure how official that is or if those are even taken seriously on a resume but I was still interested because its a class from Cisco. This was also a good course and resource but wanted more.
Continued with my search I then found a free course offered by Harvard called "CS50's Introduction to Programming with Python" this one while being free had options to upgrade at a cost for a certification. This interested me allot as it being a free option offered from Harvard, researching more found that while this was a good option it was made for someone further along with their knowledge but would be good to give a go further down the road, saving that and furthering my research. Dialing it back and finding better starter options I found another class on udemy being recommend by allot of people called "100 Days of Code: The Complete Python Pro Bootcamp" by Dr. Angela Yu . This one seemed like a great place to start and my further research found allot of people recommend this one, but this one is not free like the others and currently money is tight so this one I bookmarked and will keep at the front of my mind as I go through the free options as I may still want to circle back to this one once I can purchase it.
Now I wanted to find one more free options and came to one on Replit called "100-days-of-python", I don't know if it was just spontaneous and eagerness but I liked this site and so I jumped on it as a foot in the water on learning to get myself motivated for some of the other courses I found to go at harder than just 10-20min a day.
So for the last 5 days I have committed to making sure I complete each day of the 100 days of python course through Replit at the very least each day. So far it has been enjoyable, a decent IDE to work with and broken into parts about 10-20min a day which is easy to do and was getting me excited for more. There is a video for each day where a somewhat funny British guy will walk you through what the day is about and each step with points to pause and work on it which I like rather than just rush through. While it is free of course there has been at least one point where they pushed to upgrade, it seems that after each day it will save your days work to their repo system and after 3 days you hit your max limit and it pushes you to upgrade to continue and it words it like you may have to pay but I found that you can delete these old repos from previous days and clear space to continue.
The focus on those 5 days so far has been on using the print command and how to work with responses from that, its been fun so far and looking forward to biting into it more than just 10-20min a day. So this week I plan on enacting my plan of working on myself almost as if it was a job, I have been getting in the habit of getting up early again and making breakfast first thing and getting myself in a good mood naturally. The plan is start in the morning on the free udemy class I found with bits and parts of the freecodecamp class as I go forward depending on if I want more intro into things. Will spend about 4-6 hours a day with a few breaks between on just grinding away with that path and go from there. While I don't want to set the bar to high I also don't want to leave the door option for any failure, if for some reason I'm not happy learning python or feel I need to take a step back I will jump back to the Web Design course on freecodecamp and continue where I left off and make the progression to python eventually from there but I don't think it will come to that.
To avoid any further pressure on myself I wont make this a day by day blog of my journey but rather a weekly breakdown of how the week went, what I'm learning, how im liking it and if the mood strikes me maybe more that. Into the void or not thanks for listening.