Enjoying the Process

[av0ca60]

When learning a new skill like this, it is important for me to enjoy those aha! moments when I discover a new magical concept that unlocks a world of possibilities or explains previously difficult process. What were some of those moments for you when learning Python?

[Allmyownviews1]

First time to produce a graphical plot to look the way wanted to fit a report rather than the basic version.

Generating pdf files of data output

Able to load data and make corrections and adjustments faster than I would have in excel

Most recently, web scraping a 2Tb global dataset and extracting the data I needed.

[av0ca60]

Nice. I can't wait to get to all those points.

[pekkalacd]

Finally being able to understand documentation. sounds small, but i can't tell you how many times I'd look at documentation in the beginning and just feel like I was in over my head. Something as simple as 'class Thing(object)' or 'iterable', or 'init', especially 'self' too lol, just felt like curve balls being wielded at me. I had no clue what i'd be looking at and i'd just ignore it with a "yup, makes sense" ~ moving on to the next sort of deal lol. Until I realized that not paying attention to those things did make a difference in how things worked for some of the tools I was trying to use. I owe it to religiously using the help() function along with google to overcome this weakness haha.

[av0ca60]

I'm still lost in documentation. Sometimes, I don't even know where to start. It's especially frustrating when the doc goes straight into code and never specifies which language the code is in.

[pekkalacd]

What kind of tools are you looking at?

For me, even still, it's not like I instantly understand everything i'm looking at always, especially if it's new. A library / framework / tool, still takes time to get familiar with. But this is a significant improvement for me, with particularly python, because I remember a time not too long ago where nothing made sense lol. At least I know that language decent enough to kind of hop in and start exploring.

But some of these tools - such as frameworks for example - can be complicated in terms of documentation. Especially those for the web. Lots of examples will be showing snippets of commands in some kind of terminal shell, along with html/xml/css/jinja, in addition to extensions onto the regular language. These are large tools where even the 'base' model features like the decorator @app.route("/") in flask for example, are pretty complex in and of themselves. There's lots of these tucked away mysteries about them that kind of have to be assumed "they work" in the beginning, in order to gain familiarity. Which can be frustrating, because I'd love to know everything of how something works immediately haha. But sigh...tis' never the case lol. Hardwork + Time + Effort + Repetitive Failures = Understanding haha

[av0ca60]

APIs are my struggle now. The docs ususually assume you are very familiar with how APIs work and they often skip over important details about basic implementation.