My Not-So-Secret Hobby

Photo by luis gomes

You might or might not know this, but I started learning to code in 2021. A dear friend taught me the basics of Python, but it was essentially up to me to decide if I was going to further my self-education of this coding language. At the time he taught me about variables, loops, lists and dictionaries in 3 days. Even though it was a lot to take in, it was something I really wanted to learn, which made it easier for me to absorb.

I was hooked, until I realized I didn't have enough knowledge to build basically anything, which led me to try and learn from freecodecamp. It didn't work for me, honestly. The lessons were "interactive" in a sense, but weren't split into episodes or chapters which would've made it easier to keep track of where I left off the previous session. I tried other sources on YT to no avail. Udemy was next. This one helped me immensely to build both skill and confidence in my ability to code. Though I'm still building some really basic web pages, tiny useless applications and whatnot, it's still proof of my progress. What is most important to me is to learn the skill, even if I don't use proper technique or form the first time, I could still learn correct technique (like PEP8 in python, for example) later on. It's much like driving. You really only know what you're doing wrong once you're actually doing it.

What can be dishearting sometimes is when it takes me more than three days to decide how I'm going to solve the parts of the assignments given by Angela (the Python instructor), then I'd sit and contemplate whether longer code should be written or shorter code, but possibly larger runtime and/or time complexity. Indecisiveness is not a good quality for a code/programmer to have. Honestly, it helps to just start working on the assignment or project, rather than waiting for inspo to come through, because how else will the project be finished if I constantly deliberate about how to perfect a project the first time around rather than actually working on it. This would happen mostly with projects that require quite some logic to process files.

Although I have not been entirely devoted to develop this skill, it's something I could do when there were some negative things happening in my life. Especially, at the time I started learning it, I was very damaged, up to the point where I had nightmares every day, woke up with pulputations and a sense of helplessness. This played a part in bringing me a sense of self-importance, learning to appreciate myself and my mind, albeit very fragile and scarred. I can only imagine what such a hobby has done for others.