So, first off for a little background, I have never taken a CompSci course in my life. The closest thing that I took was a course on Final Edit Pro my senior year of high school, which I failed (I almost failed my whole senior year due to truancy and homelessness but that's a story for another time.) The only college credit that I have is in Speech, which is the only class that I didn't just stop going to, which means that between AP Psych in high school and Intro to Psych in college, that I've taken the same class twice and still have nothing tangeable to show for it. I'm now 33 and have no intentions whatsoever of going back to school, but my thirst to learn and grow are greater than ever, which leads me into today's blog. My journey started a couple of years ago when I started grinding towards relevant knowledge for IT certifications, which seemed like the most logical escape from the life of a 30 year old burnout who just had their first kid and desparately needed to get their sh*t together. I've always liked computers, spent way more time than healthy on the internet, and I've always typed lightning fast (thanks video games), so like many, it seemed like the perfect choice. And honestly, it is. The knowledge and skills that I've gained make me feel like some sort of apprentice sorcerer working on their spellcrafting, and I won't deny loving feeling the eyes on me when I'm in public going 100 miles an hour in NeoVim or knocking out some terminal work on my laptop, its an absolute rush. All that said, I'm still a noob and always have more to learn so I'm going back and finishing another thing that I started and never completed, which is the Harvard C50's Intro to Programming with Python video, which I've only gotten around 4 hours in (just past the for loops section) and I've had an itch in the back of my brain to finish it for quite some time now. At this point, I've taken Python courses from multiple platforms, dwelved into multiple books, and have done a plethora of tutorials, but I see a lot of value in this 16 hour course, which against all of my lack of ability to sit and listen for more than 10 minutes, I am going to complete. I really love Python and make a point to write some every day, which means that I owe it to both the medium and myself to become as good at it as I possibly can. If that means that I have to get over my attention issues for 12 more hours to do it, so be it, challenge accepted. For anyone unfamiliar, this course (offered by freecodecamp.org) is available for free on Youtube, which means that you can stream it via mpv by pasting the link in after the command or download it via yt-dlp and then play it in mpv anyway (you know, if you're on your laptop all day at work but don't have internet besides your phone's awful hotspot...) ANYWAY, its a pretty awesome free resource available out there and I plan on fully utilizing it. I have 8 hours a day at work with little else to do than work on this, so I honestly have no excuse not to knock out the last 12 hours of this course by Friday. I enjoy blogging like this because it makes me feel very accountable, even if nobody reads this, the possibility that somebody is paying attention pushes me to not cut corners and do exactly what I'm going to do, which needs to be a default setting anyway soooo....let's get to work. I do really like this course. As an average camel case and single quotes enjoyer, I tend to write out the examples in my own style but I imagine that's better that mindlessly copypasta'ing. But I also love that it's almost making me go slow, which is something that I have a lot of trouble with, but when I can pull it off, the amount of information that gets not only retained, but ingrained increases tenfold. I also really like the student questions, I feel like they're questions that I would want to hear or even ask myself if I was sitting in the classroom, which is awesome. A lot of it is stuff that I've learned and feel like I know, but I'm going to snail through it regardless because I know that its good for me. Now we're on to importing libraries, I've got a terminal window open playing with random.randint while he's explaining random and how to import it. The hardest part about this is definitely when I approach topics that I do understand and not zoning out but I find that if I push back my lower impulses and keep watching, I always learn something that I wasn't completely aware of before. Here we are, and it's Saturday. I was sick all day yesterday so no progress there, but I'm gonna go ahead and post this article today to at least get some content out, and keep muscling away at this course. Stay tuned for updates!