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Tristan C
Tristan C

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šŸLearning Markdown for my Jupyter Notebooks

This is my first post on dev.to as I follow the Scrimba course on Learning Markdown. I've used Markdown previously while I was in uni, but I never formally learned how to use it.

"You have to seize any knowledge you can retrieve." - BW

Speaking of uni, I earned my Master of Information Technology (Cyber Security and Networks) from Queensland University of Technology in 2024. Before that, I completed a Bachelor of Business in Human Resource Management and Management at Griffith University in 2012. In betweenā€”and still todayā€”Iā€™ve been working as a security guard at events. Itā€™s one of those situations where you start a job, and before you know it, a decade has passed without really putting your degree to use. Even though I now have a Masterā€™s, I recognize that my foundation in IT isnā€™t as strong as Iā€™d like, so Iā€™m currently focusing on strengthening the fundamentals and building a portfolio.

Here is a couple videos of my projects
IoT for Lunch
Math Game with micro:bit

Initially I was working my way through a few courses on Coursera and Microsoft Learn.

  • IBM Ethical Hacking with Open Source Tools
  • IBM Cybersecurity Analyst
  • MS-900 Introduction to Microsoft 365: Describe Microsoft 365 apps and services

I was taking these courses as refresher and to get ready for the CompTIA Sec+ Certification. Then I had a sudden thought.

"Do they have a course about GitHub?"

Somehow in the process of trying to find a course on how to use GitHub, I ended up starting the Google IT Automation with Python Professional Certificate.

To try something new and refreshing, I decided to try Jupyter Notebooks in VS Code as my main IDE. Funnily enough a number of tutors in the programming classes used Jupyter Notebooks. I never really paid attention to it as I couldn't get it working the first time. I was more familiar with C# and Visual Studio. Luckily they also provided supplementary resources to convert it to C#. Now that I'm learning Python I can see why the were using it.

Why Markdown?

Markdown Logo

A number of reasons I'm learning Markdown is that:

  1. It makes keeping my notes and scripts for the python programming course in the same file.
  2. It has formatting options so it looks easier for me to read.
  3. As a novice programmer, it feels like an entry gate to coding.

An example of this is:

sorted()

here is an example of using the sorted() function:

time_list = [12, 2, 32, 19, 57, 22, 14] #A random array of numbers.
print (sorted(time_list)) #Prints to screen a sorted list.
print (time_list) #Shows that sorted() doesn't affect the original variable.
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

It gives me better readability for my notebook, while still keeping to best practices of self documenting.

The purpose of this first post is demonstrate some of the fundamentals I learned through the markdown course and to add as a portfolio. As I continue my ongoing learning, hopefully I'll start adding more posts to dev.to. When I was younger I wanted to be a blog poster, its only now in my late 30s that I'm doing the things I want to do.

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