In this week of blogging, I will be talking about my current progress, youtube tutorials, and my plans for the future.

#Current progress#

So it has been a week since I took Python seriously and I must say, I’m satisfied with my progress. Freecodecamp was the main resource I employed, but this quickly became an issue when I realised I couldn't apply any of those new concepts. E.g. When I learnt about if-statements, I initially found it difficult to understand their application. So I decided to take some beginner tutorial projects from youtube, these were incredible tools that helped me understand if-statements, loops and iterations. This was important since I learn by doing, but also enjoy the theory. So within a week, I decided to implement the occasional youtube tutorial to cement new python concepts.

#The youtube project#

My first tutorial was an adventure game created by 'Teach with Tim'. This was a great way to consolidate all the topics I learnt so far which includes: variables, expressions, statements and conditional execution. The biggest takeaway was conditional execution, so to give the context of what this game was like, it's a game where the programme asks a range of questions and you as the user responds respectively, depending on the response they will either find the treasure or eaten e.g. ‘do you climb down the cliff (yes/no)?’ if you said no some lions find you on top of the cliff so you lose… a very simple programme which enabled me to use conditional statements for a couple of hours.

Due to the nature of the project I was able to venture off and make the tutorial project my own. I made a game where the user is required to input their name as ‘Bond’ to begin the game, they later go through a maze where they fight lions, bandits and robots. I spent 3 hours creating this world [time well spent in my opinion]. Through this experience, I got my first taste of debugging and was enjoying myself creating multiple ‘if’ and ‘else’ statements. To conclude, the youtube project allowed me to take what I knew from Freecodecamp and put it into practice for a couple of hours. I would recommend this if you are struggling with Freecodecamp as it's [freecodecamp] quite a passive way to learn how to code.

#Plans for the future#

I'm trying to build an online portfolio of my Data science skills. Since I don't have a CS degree, this will be crucial for landing a job that requires expertise in coding. There will be more blogs in the future that spends time discussing my projects, but we will cross that bridge when we get there.

Outside of programming, I have been reading this sci-fi book: Project hail mary (PHM) by andy weir, it has been an incredible journey so far. I don't want to spoil too much of the book for you, but it follows scientists going out to space to save the world. The plot is great, it is also so easy to follow, considering it is a sci-fi book in PHM you don't need a degree in physics to understand what is going on, but it takes an interesting topic in scientific research (can you have life without water), and goes into detail in such a fashion anyone can follow. I don't know if it will be my book of the year, but I can say, if you liked the martian (book or film) I think this one is better.

I'm going back to university in October, so I have decided to make a detailed plan on how much I'm going to code. I made a spreadsheet, enabling me to track my progress, which simplifies my weekly targets. So wish me luck, I'm confident I'll be able to balance university work and coding work in the coming months.

#Conclusion#

Thank you for reading this far, I Tried a new structure, hope you guys like it!