How am I getting there?

#python

Coding and me it’s a long story…
Turbo Pascal, VB6.0 and nothing for years…
And 1 year ago I came across an Udemy course of Jose Portilla : Complete Python Bootcamp: Go from Zero to Hero in Python 3, and I admit that the title immediately attracted me.

I always loved coding, I remember my sleepless nights with VB 6 for a small insurance client management software. Whenever I learnt something new, I absolutely had to implement it the same evening.
So this Udemy’s course, as would say, propel me in a nostalgic past that I wanted to relive. But the question was: Could I follow that pace at 38 years old? Why not, was my answer.

The training
So I started with this course, I made it follow with Data visualization (Pandas, Numpy, Matplotlib etc …) and I continued with course to create 10 real applications. I had to start doing something with what I learnt.

I had a steady pace, training after training, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Computer Vision, Flask, Web Scraping… I didn’t stop. Some notions were repeated when you do so many courses, but suddenly you understand them better.

I automatically enter all the libraries import at the beginning of each code without thinking

import pandas as pd

import numpy as np

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split

from sklearn.preprocessing import LabelEncoder, OneHotEncoder

from sklearn.preprocessing import StandardScaler

The Pyhton community

By enrolling my son in an Udemy course, to initialize him at Python, I discovered Discord. There, I discovered a community, passionate people, people who have integrated or will integrate school 42, older people who decided to switch entirely to Linux (with all the constraints that the may know at the beginning). Young people motivate the older ones, without ever thinking they are better than them (even if they are!).

With Discord community, I discovered Git, Github, GitLab, Heroku and the Codewars’ challenges. These challenges gave me sweats and I almost lost my hair. But when you find the solution (with the least possible lines of code, because otherwise you do not feel different) you say “Great !”.

When you enter a discord, you enter another country, where you don’t understand the language with every two words technical terms, emojis that you never seen before.
This community [which for them, enter instructions via the terminal is a breeze] is there to help you, they are patient, because you don’t know how to explain your problem, the answer is very stupid for them and for you also after you discovered it (you have forgotten a parenthesis or a colon) and they respond to you with all kindness.

And comes a day, it’s up to you to help someone to understand slicing in the numpy array, remaining humble because it’s the spirit of this discord.

Experience

Coding is really time consuming and it’s hard to stop.

I didn’t go out the evening, or only when it was necessary. It was the first thing I did after my work days. And then you remember that you have a family too, children who ask for attention. So I slowed down the pace.

Then comes the phase where everything goes wrong, nothing works. You have so much conflict in the conda libraries (too much: pip install …), that when your deep learning script works, your opencv script doesn’t work. You have so many things installed, so many libraries that your computer becomes a real storeroom.
One solution is available to you, format the laptop and start again from scratch.
Go learn virtual environments to avoid library conflicts, open virtual machines if you want to try your code on Linux and so on…

I’ve experienced so much type of error, I’ve spent so much time in stack overflow, that everything starts to become more simple. I grab the wished information without reading all the lines in forum. It becomes almost natural !

And finally …

But with all that, 8 months of intensive coding, I still felt like I’m not ready! rightly or wrongly.

The next step is to build Projects to feed a portfolio…