Nothing to see here

Remember when I said this a week or two ago…

“Objectives for this blog are pretty simple:

Blackmail myself into sticking with it when I have an off week and don’t want to study”

Well it happened, kind of.  So far I’ve been averaging 4-5 hours of study time a week on a poor week and 8 ish on a good week. This one has weighed in at a rather uninspiring 2 hours.

A combination of wedding commitments (I get married in 5 weeks), usual work pressures and ‘life’ has hit my normally productive evening study block of 8-11pm.

Treehouse provide the rather nice 7 day tracker on your homepage showing the number of steps you’ve completed each day. Normally I find it really motivational, today less motivational and more…..fear inducing.

So, kick up the backside writing this, write off the week as the first bad one so far, refocus on Monday and get rolling again

Month 1 – The (very) basics

The first month has been pretty interesting; Treehouse as a learning site works really well for me. The main course is taught through teacher led videos with the student using a Workspace window to work in while following the videos. Being able to pause the videos while I play with something in particular or (more often), try to correct an error I’ve made is really useful.

After completing 1/2 tuition videos you’re presented with a code challenge to complete in your own time. These can be frustrating…..as a complete newbie I often find I understand an individual component yet struggle to understand how to apply it with another component to solve a problem. It’s getting easier as I learn more so the technique obviously works

As you progress through the course (Techdegree has 12 units, each consisting of 2-4 courses, 1-3 workshops and a final project), completing the code challenges and quizzes you earn points and badges. My initial response to these was not complimentary but they’ve rapidly grown on me.

Getting a small reward at the end of a piece of work is quite satisfying! It does feel a little like earning badges back in Scouts but I enjoyed that as well so each to their own

 

So far I’ve built a number of small apps (Hangman, Shopping List, Letter Game), I doubt Bill Gates will be calling anytime soon but it’s nice to build complete things no matter how small. Having something to show people helps with the feeling of making progress.

I’ve also spent some time browsing the library of courses and there’s a few additional modules I want to look at as well as the main Techdegree. My objective isn’t to just pass a course and get a certificate, I want to become more knowledgeable broadly so learning complementary skills makes a lot of sense.

The available courses vary in length from 30 mins to 5/6 hours so having something different to work on when Python gets a bit much will help keep me motivated I think. Some of the other courses I’ve got bookmarked are: Building an Alexa Skill, Rest Api Basics, GitHub Basics and Technology Foundations

So, overall it’s been a good first month! I’m enjoying the course, the material is interesting, well presented and easy to use. Regular Google searches and referring to a book* to get over little hurdles is proving useful as well.

Finding blocks of 3-4 hours to study is difficult/borderline impossible some weeks so I’m trying to hit a weekly target of 6-8 hours study. So far this has been about right and can be made up of random hours here and there or the occasional half day during a quiet weekend.

* I got a copy of “Python Programming for the absolute beginner” just before starting the Treehouse course. Very accessible for a newbie and well worth a look

Getting started with Python & Treehouse

My starting point for all this was the desire to be able to create things for myself outside of my normal day job.

In terms of thought process it went something like this “…’technical people’ know how to write code….they know how to make and build interesting things….everything I look at that’s interesting and I want to be able to do relies on a programming language….go learn that”

Extremely well thought out and coherent, as I’m sure you’ve judged for yourself.

A few conversations with people later and Python kept cropping up as a great way to get started in programming. An ‘easier’ language, great for things like working with Data and with lots of online learning resources available.

From there it’s an easy jump to sites like Treehouse and Code Academy et al. I test drove a couple of resources on each site and decided to go for Treehouse. Code Academy was good as well but the tone and style of the main teaching resources didn’t grab me as much.

There’s different paid levels you can subscribe to at $25 or $49 (roughly £20 and £40) depending on the materials you want access to and what you want to study.

I actually went a step further though and signed up for the Python Techdegree. This is one of a series  of larger courses designed to take a newbie from the basic steps right through to being ‘real world’ employment ready. It’s more expensive at $199/£148 per month but the wide range of skills you learn to complement learning Python really appealed to me.

The course is 3-12 months long depending on how much time you can dedicate to it; realistically I’ll be shooting to complete it in a year.

Objectives for this blog are pretty simple:

• Blackmail myself into sticking with it when I have an off week and don’t want to study
• Maintain and improve this blog as a learning experience in itself
• Share progress on a regular basis and hopefully provide some insight for others looking to learn the same things as me

Onwards!

Introductions…

After a fairly standard career in financial services (insurance, banking, mortgages, motor claims), I ended up working at Rainbird Technologies in July 2014.

You can check Rainbird out HERE. I won’t be writing about it that much and nothing here is work related, but it’s relevant to why I started this blog and what I’m doing at the moment.

As a non techie, joining a tech startup was….interesting. Very much the ‘in at the deep end approach’, particularly as I was the first non technical hire back then.

Fast forward to April 2017 and we’ve been through the Techstars accelerator program (London, Winter 2014), I’ve done a variety of jobs at the company and seen a lot of interesting stuff in some very interesting places.

Except, much of the technical side of things was confusing. Actually some of it was bewildering and a lot of it was confusing! Which was a good thing because it’s fired an interest to know how everything works and to be able to do those things for myself rather than rely on others all the time.