A Long Journey

Today was the first day of a three day weekend for me. In my post yesterday, I mentioned that I planned to get to the pool every day and also that I wanted to take an ample amount of naps. Sadly, neither of these things happened, but I don't consider the day to be a total loss, rather it was a pretty good day. I got up really early with my little girl and got her some breakfast. She's only 2, but if I ask her a question, she can usually comprehend what I'm saying and respond accordingly. I asked her if she would like to go to the pool, expecting her to be really excited. She told me no, which was super disappointing. So, instead, I got some stuff done around the house, finally cleaning up after a week of not having the time to do so. A 2 year old is like a tornado, tearing everything apart that they touch. 4 days without cleaning and the house looks like a war zone. I'll still have to do some more cleaning tomorrow, but I put a dent in it. When we got her down for a nap, she decided she wasn't going to sleep at all, which meant no nap for me either. But, after she got up, I made a run to get some pizza and now we're hanging out before she goes to bed. All in all, a pretty good day.

While she was in her bedroom trying to take a nap, I got to work on my Python course. I'm about halfway through this 30-hour course, and I've just now finished up the advanced topics of the language. Nothing was really difficult to comprehend, and there weren't any concepts I wasn't already familiar with from my time with JavaScript. Python does have a few tricks up its sleeve that are not in JavaScript, and some that are but I never really use. It appears that decorators make an appearance in Python, which is an available feature with TypeScript, but I don't think JavaScript has access to decorators. It is a strange feature that I think can be pretty powerful when used, but is very abstract. There is a lot of syntax that I'm going to have to get used to, but nothing to obscene. Python is very semantic, so for a lot of things, if you know what you're looking for, the syntax just makes sense. I think the most important thing I've learned over the past year is figuring out how to find the answers I need through Google. Now that I have that skill mastered, it transfers over really well for using Python. There have been several exercises where I didn't know the answer off-hand, but I was able to find it pretty quickly with a Google search.

This July 16th will make it a full year since I started writing this blog. I'm not there yet, but it's incredible to me that I've been able to write an entry every single day without missing a single day. I've never been so dedicated to anything in my life as I have been in the last year to learning to code, and I'm starting to reap the benefits of the hard work. Coming up on a year has me wondering what I will do with this blog once I reach that milestone. As of now, I'm going to be shutting it down. I've felt for a while now that the entries are becoming a bit repetitive, and if you were reading them, you might not be getting very much new content. Unless things change, July 16th will be my last entry, at least for a while. I may decide to pick it back up, or maybe I'll change the format to become more of a technical blog, but I think this exercise has run its course. I have plenty of momentum to put in the work every day to where I no longer need this as an extra layer of motivation. Before I go, I would like to sum up the last year. I think for other people looking to learn to code, there is a lot to learn from my story, and I want to be able to sum that up a little bit. Over the next 2 weeks, I will have several entries focused on the journey to this point. I don't know how to do it, but I want to end this blog well.

Until tomorrow!