Another Long Weekend
Last weekend, I took Friday off to enjoy my daughter's birthday with our family. This weekend, I have Friday off for the 4th of July. My plan last weekend was to get to the pool every day, but I was only able to do so one time. I need to make this right. I will be going to the pool every single day if I can help it, and I'm going to enjoy it. We always go pretty early in the morning to avoid the crowds, and hopefully that holds true on the holiday weekend. I suspect that the numbers will be up slightly, but as long as we go before 11, it shouldn't be an issue. Beyond that, I plan on taking a nap at least 2 out of the 3 days. More importantly, I'm really excited to put in some work on my Python course. I'm really enjoying it, and I'm starting to get into some more interesting topics. I'm also in the middle of watching all of the Star Wars TV shows and movies, and I'm starting to get to the really good ones. Right now, I'm watching Rogue One, which is awesome, and that's followed by episodes 4 through 6. It should be a fun weekend.
In other news, Coronavirus just continues to rage on, even ramping up quite a bit. In the last week, we've seen exponential growth across the country. In Florida, we are seeing about as high of numbers as we can possibly see. Today, we had over 10,000 cases for the first time, but the beat goes on. Our 2-bit governor refuses to roll back the progress he's made in reopening, leaving all of completely vulnerable. I've said it before, but the decision was clearly made that the lives lost from this pandemic will be sacrificed in favor of the economy. It doesn't matter how many people die from this virus; as long as our economy survives, that's all that matters to the powers that be. This plan is starting to backfire, though. What the powers that be did not expect is that people would be unwilling to participate in the economy if it's too dangerous to do so. Reservations are dropping at restaurants and people are starting to realize how dangerous it really is out there right now. Not everybody, though. At my work, I'm still one of 3 people who wear a mask out of about 30 people. That, to me, just does not make any sense.
As I said, I'm having so much fun learning about Python. There are so many similarities to JavaScript in the basic fundamentals, which make it so much easier to learn. I'm sure if this were my first programming language, I would be slogging through this process, but the second time around, it just makes sense. One of my least favorite and most challenging topics in programming is object oriented programming. This is something I very rarely use, but it will become more important as I progress with my career. I feel like OOP comes into play more while architecting systems, whereas when you are writing the working code, functional programming reigns supreme. I just got through the advanced section covering OOP and it went pretty well. It's similar to JavaScript in a lot of ways, just with different keywords. There's a constructor with a super that's called __init__, there's a "this" keyword called "self," and the basic principles are exactly the same. I'm glad it went better than I thought, but I'm also glad to be finished with this section. Before that, we finally set up our local environment. He had us set up 3 different ways to code: a text editor, vsCode, an IDE, PyCharm, and Jupyter Notebook. I love vsCode, so I was glad to be able to use this, but I'm really excited to learn more about Jupyter Notebook; it seems to be a favorite of the community.
Until tomorrow!
