3rd coding anniversary! and 30 days of Python: 30/30
Last night I was going through my blog and doing some tag maintenance (still in progress), and I realized that the next day – today, August 10 – is my third anniversary of starting to learn to code for real!
I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve progressed slowly. I hear about some coding newbies who reach (or even surpass) my current level within a few months of starting to study. But I think those people are usually doing it full-time, all day every day, so I don’t feel too bad :) I’ve been taking more of a slow-but-steady approach these past three years, sometimes not coding at all for months at a time, and then other times doing it every day for hours. And it’s been working, bit by bit.
Today, appropriately enough, I reached two new milestones:
1) I finally, FINALLYYYYYYYY completed my greatly delayed “30 days of Python” challenge that I started almost four months ago :D
2) I finished all the basic logic for my first “serious” app, a web scraper I started working on two days ago. It’s an interfaith calendar – I found a webpage that lists all the major holidays for various religions, and my app will tell you if the current day is a religious holiday according to that list. Sounds simple, but was kind of complicated because the DOM structure of the webpage is a bit of a disaster :P
In any case, I finished all the fundamental code to make it do what I want it to do, and now all I have to handle is all the edge cases caused by the source site’s messiness. That’ll be at least a couple more days of work. But I still feel so PROUD of my little project!
I’ll post a link to the GitHub page up here once the final kinks are ironed out :)