Hello, world & fellow devs!
What got me here? Like most modern lore, it started on social media, Twitter to be exact. When I stumbled upon the account @DanGambleAI, a software engineer who conjures sports picks with his algorithms. Witnessing his success repeatedly and over time, I thought, "What would it take to learn something like this?" From a background in digital marketing, I was no stranger to analytics, but this? This was a whole new way I’ve seen someone use their coding skills ‘up close’ in a unique way beyond the cliche of creating and selling a program to a large corporation (not saying that's a bad thing).
Driven by curiosity, I dived into GitHub, scavenging through open-source codes and ultimately finding one that was plug-and-play ready similar to what I had seen. With ChatGPT as my sidekick, because before this I had zero familiarity with the 1st thing about any kind of coding, I navigated through my first cloud-based IDE, read my 1st set of developer documentation, and troubleshot the inevitable errors that arose in executing the code. And guess what? Wha-lah, It worked! That exhilarating moment of triumph was my gateway drug into the world of data science and from there, I enrolled in CodingNomads, Harvard’s CS50x Intro to Computer Science, and built out an entire self-paced curriculum made up of online learning resources to develop a more grounded understanding of the subject.
Towards the end of Python 101 and learning more about, Pandas and NumPy, comes this assignment, create a hangman game. By defining a function to display the current state of the word, and using the string method concatenation, I made the code inside each loop clean by setting the variable ‘guessed_word’ and assigning it the value of [‘_’] * len(code_word) to add a space between the underscores of each character in the index, ‘code_word’. This way, it wouldn’t simply appear as a straight line. Rather, the separated underscores as placeholders to display user input for each guessed character are more appealing and intuitive for the game. Then the state of the game is defined as print(‘ “.join(guessed_word)) before entering the main game loop also showing the hint for the answer.
This course & assignment wasn’t a task, it was my initiation into programming. A journey filled with frustration, yes, but also immense satisfaction and learning. I’m just at the beginning, l will check in soon to document my journey, please feel free to connect and collaborate with me also on Github here, github.com/1marcjac.
Farewell!
Top comments (0)