Learning Python
June 3, Monday
Been learning Javascript but have been forgetting to log it. I've made a left turn a few weeks ago and am learning Python now. I'm seeing what it has to offer and so far, it's cool.
Today I started a 4.5 hr Youtube video and got 2 hrs in. I learned a lot in the few weeks but I'm reinforcing the basics before I get too deep in.
I built a calculator, improved the calculator, then also a Mad Libs game.
June 4, Tuesday
Today I did another 1.5 hrs of the Youtube video. I reinforced while loops, for loops, and dictionaries.
The new stuff I learned today was try/except, reading, writing, and appending files, and the wonderful world of modules/pip. I'll need to go back to modules to experiment with the many possibilities of that.
I built a guessing game, an exponent function, and a translator today. I think I will add to these little projects I've been building in the lesson to make them nicer then post them here.
June 5, Wednesday
Today I improved my calculator a bit more.
June 6, Thursday
Today I created a guessing game. It has room for improvement, but it's a decent first draft.
June 7, Friday
Today I created a translator to a giraffe language. Yes, I said giraffe. Another a decent first draft.
They say it's better to build something and improve it later than simply not build anything because you don't know enough, so that's what I'm doing.
June 8, Saturday
Today I learned about classes, objects, object functions, inheriting classes, and using python in the terminal. With this new information I created a multiple choice quiz. Once again, a good start, but can be improved.
I've officially finished that Youtube video I started in the beginning of the week. It gave a a lot of useful information.
Think I'm going to focus on project based learning this time and look into projects to do to enforce what I've learned and advance my knowledge through useful situations.
June 9, Sunday
Worked on improving the quiz. I was creating a grading system but got stuck on an unknown problem with my if/else statements.
Rented 3 Javascript books from the library and will get back into that soon as well.
June 10, Monday
Kept working on the grading system today. Not sure what's wrong. Bought 2 Python books today and hopefully they'll help me with this current problem and move me forward overall.
The 2 books I got were Python 3 the Hard Way and Python Crash Course. Hopefully they work well for me.
June 11, Tuesday
As Ice Cube said, today was a good day. I FINALLY figured out the grading system then I also fixed the user input so that it will accept multiple versions of the right answer. Since I was using a class instead of if/else statements, that was a whole adventure in itself. But I figured it out after a lot of googling and experiementing. Tomorrow I will work on showing people their right and wrong answers.
I gave people a link to test out the test and nobody could break it! That's always good. Their feedback was just that they just wanted to know their answers.
My Python books came today too, so that adds to the good day!
I'm quite happy with my progress so far in Python. Makes me not want to go back to Javascipt just yet lol.
1:12 AM update (kind of tomorrow, but still today): I read through the first 20 pages of Learn Python 3 the Hard Way. It's quite funny. He talks directly to you and talks back to you because he knows the crazy stuff you're thinking already lol. It definitely makes the books engaging. Excited to see what I get from it.
June 12, Wednesday
Today I successfully added the show answers and play again on my trivia quiz. Both were surprisingly easier than I thought. So to challenge myself more, I decided to create difficulty levels but the play again loop and the difficulty loop don't like each other for some reason. Separately they work though. So that's been my main project today and will be tomorrow. New day, new eyes!
June 13, Thursday
Welp, still stuck on this difficulty loop. I did discover that what I thought yesterday about the loop, isn't what's happening. So that was linear progress I guess... Still don't have a solution though, but there's always tomorrow
Read another 20 pages of my Python book as well.
June 14, Friday
YAYYYYY!!!! I figured out the repeating loop situation! I found the pattern of what changed when I changed little parts of the code and figured out it was simply adding a break and removing an indent. Those dang indents lol. I feel the quiz is pretty complete. I've sent it to some friends to help me test, so we'll see what they come back with.
This satisfying feeling of creating something from nothing is just great! Probably going to start something new tomorrow. Or work on improving one of my earlier basic projects. We'll see!
Update: Added a blocking loop to not allow only blanks, spaces, or numbers. An answer must be given. NOW I think it's finished.
Play the Music Trivia Quiz here
June 15, Saturday
2:42 AM(kind of tomorrow, but still today):
Welp... losing track of time, my visual streak is officially broken. BUT today in about 5.5 hrs I created hangman without a tutorial. Overall it's finished, but the only reason I didn't finish by midnight was because I decided to create the actual hangman images. Making them and figuring out how to add them in a loop is what I'm working on now. Will finish tomorrow.
I'm very proud of my progress in python so far. Still sad about the visual streak though :(, but oh well
June 16, Sunday
Finished my Hangman in 8 hours! Much quicker than the week it took to finish the Music Trivia Quiz. I'm very proud of my progress so far.
Side note: The simpleness of Python is helping me understand Javascript concepts better. That's a win-win in my book!
I'm waiting on feedback from family and peers, but I'm confident this game is good and fun! The words may be a bit too hard simply from longness, but we'll see. Also note that this isn't just a guess the word game that everyone seems to make. And some call their's hangman when it's just a basic guess the word too. Mine is a full on hangman. Googling around, I wasn't finding any examples of anyone doing this so that was good motivation to create it.
June 17, Monday
Today I read another 20 pages of the Python the Hard Way book. It's getting into stuff I don't know yet, so I will start coding along with it now. But from what I've seen so far, I'm not sure I like the teaching style of the book. I'll keep at this one a bit, but might try the other book I got, Python Crach Course, instead.
I've decided to advance now but am kind of lost on where to go next. I was thinking blackjack, but when I googled versions, they felt boring as just text, which got me googling GUI and tkinter. Now I'm wondering, do I want to go that deep into the game side? My friend suggested Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, but once again do I want to stay in the game side? I'm not sure of many useful Python things I can do that aren't super easy or super boring. I know I don't care about plotting data into graphs, but idk where to go now. Should I just go back to Javascript where I should be anyway?
I'm finding that I do enjoy the process of project based learning. I've wanted to do it for awhile, but never understood it at first. Like how can I do projects if I don't know where to start? But I feel I'm figuring it out, and I like it! But now the quesion is what route and what route?
June 18, Tuesday
Still unsure of my direction, I started looking into Django. At least I'll be in the web field like I'm supposed to be instead of going deeper into gaming. I found what looks like a good tutorial, but realized that before I start Django I need more advanced Python concepts. So I backed up and found a tutorial that covers more advanced topics. I started working through that today. I should be able to finish it within a couple days hopefully then I can start Django!
Oh and update... my hangman is officially unbreakable. All my programmer friends and family tried it and were very impressed they couldn't break it. They had fun too! I'm very proud of both those things!
June 19, Wednesday
Today was very busy and I didn't get a chance to do anything. I'll see if I have any renewed energy after I get home tonight... probably not though.
June 20, Thursday
Got some of my lesson in today. I obviously jinxed myself when I said, "I should be able to finish in a couple days if it's not busy"... well it got busy the day after I said this.
What little I've done these past two days, I'll make up for over the weekend.
June 21, Friday
Just got home, but working now into midnight on some lessons. Wanted my visual streak to continue because I AM doing this.
June 22, Saturday
Did more of the youtube video lessons on more advanced topics. Played around with modules today. Didn't get those the first time they were introduced to me, but I get them much better now. As of right now into midnight I'm discovering about how to use the underlying OS
June 23, Sunday
Today I learned more about the OS Module capabilities and how to read and write to files
Writing it out, it doesn't seem like much, but I spent a good few hours on these topics trying to get comfortable with them.
1:24 AM(kind of tomorrow, but still today):
Doing a video to check my Python setup, I FINALLY discovered where my pip was. Everyone/thing kept saying it's already installed with python, but I always got 'file not found' whenever I typed it. It was a big issue that I tried avoiding but knew I couldn't forever. I found out that it was under pip3! I learned how to alias stuff as well in the terminal so I aliased python=python3 and pip=pip3. Now I can just type python and pip and get 3.6 and pip info instead of 2.6 and not found. That little 3 in pip made me so happy to discover I didn't have a bad python download or something lol.
June 24, Monday
Did more videos and the topics today were parsing and renaming files and CSVs. Also did the datetime module.
Could've done more, but I was tasked with working on a logo that I forgot about today. But hey, when it's free and for family, it's not on the top of your list and you forget ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
June 25, Tuesday
Today I learned about variable scopes. I stumbled across global variables during the quiz game, but I figured I should actually learn them so I know and not just guess. So I now know LEGB. Like PEMDA, but for varibales. I also refreshed on sorting and learned about the lambda function and a sorting module. I properly learned try/except today. I stumbled across this at some point, but don't remember when. Could be good for catching errors.
I feel like I have enough concepts under my belt, that I will now start Django tomorrow. Really excited!
June 26, Wednesday
Ok, so I'm guilty here... started the Django video, then saw a related video for Web Scraping. I clicked it and that's what I focused on today. Unfortunately I'm having import issues that I'm trying to figure out. Everything is successfully installed, but it doesn't work in my code. Beautiful Soup 4, requests, bs4, nothing. A lot of googling today. At this point, I don't want to even start Django until I figure out this install, import issue. If web scraping doesn't work, Django most likely won't work either.
I also did more with that logo I was supposed to be working on. Close.
June 27, Thursday
Still stuck on this import issue. Tried a couple other work arounds, but didn't work.
June 28, Friday
Finally figured out the import issue! First I needed to import bs4, which I thought I did because I saw a folder with it, but apparently that wasn't it. Then I didn't understand the whole virtual environment thing, so I didn't realize I needed to install it into the virtual environment as well. Once I did those two things, it worked! With that, I learned web scraping today! It's very interesting and I can see alot of possibilities with it. Python keeps getting more interesting and powerful. Now TOMORROW, I shall start Django. Promise.
June 29, Saturday
So... (o_o )( o_o)... I didn't start Django. I played around with web scraping again today and worked on that free family logo I mentioned a few days ago. But as we speak, I'm starting the Django tutorial. So I did start it today technically and will go deep in tomorrow.
A little warning that my curiosity might take me into APIs at some point too. See what those are all about.
2:34 AM(kind of tomorrow, but still today):
Officially got about an hour into a Django tutorial. There is quite a lot to process at first. The set up is a lot. I walked through what each item in setting.py means. I've seen my site and admin on the local server. I've created a user, created a class in models.py and have gotten up to creating an new app and seeing it on the front end admin.
I believe tomorrow will get into custom homepages and django templates.
July 1, Monday
Continued the django video today. Covered custom homepages, URL routing and requests, and Django templates. There's more into this than I would've ever guessed, but I can see it getting easier with repetition.
July 2, Tuesday
Busy morning, busy at work, busy night. Gonna be an all nighter possibly. No coding today :(
July 3, Wednesday
Got a bit of a lesson in today. We are still on templates. Template tags, for loops, and rendering context.
Heading on a weekedn 4th of July trip, so will try to get some coding in, but we'll see...
Happy 4th of July!
July 4, Thursday
Happy 4th of July! On vacation. Traveling a lot. No coding
July 5, Friday
Vacation!
July 6, Saturday
Last day of vacation.
July 7, Sunday
Back from vacation.
July 8, Monday
Back to work! Reviewed what I already learned to make sure I didn't forget anything.
July 9, Tuesday
Way too busy today.
July 10, Wednesday
Continued reviewing what I already did. There's a lot to process in this setup of it all.
July 12, Friday
Surprise to me! Someone wanted to see my hangman game I made weeks ago and I stumbled upon a bug. I’m quite dumbfounded how it exists because I know for a fact that people tested the now bug, but I have no evidence of ever having different code. So working on finding that bug now.
August 12, Monday
Randomly started a budget program today. Got a good start on it. So far you can enter however many incomes you have and they will be added together for a total income. You can also enter your expenses as their listed, but can't get a total yet. Tomorrow I will make it so people can add their own expense items then add the expenses, then do the math.
August 13, Tuesday
Finished the expenses. Did the math on the expenses vs income. Formatted the results to look like dollars. Discovered that putting in cents doesn't work so have to fix that. Will also work on letting the user add other expenses to the list.