I recently wrote that I finally decided to learn Python. I just finished the second day of lessons. I'm learning from Google Gemini as a tutor. The lessons are geared towards eventually working with AI. It seemed like a good idea to write about my progress as a form of accountability. I risk losing interest and not learning more than a few lessons without sharing my progress.
Fortunately, Gemini is running through this at what is relatively breakneck speed compared to my college experience. I'm aware that it is leaving out many details in each lesson. I think it is trying to make me somewhat functional to where I can do some basic work. Then, as problems arise, I can backfill my knowledge with what was glossed over.
Today's lessons were a bit more involved than the previous day, which is written below. Overall, we covered Lists, Dictionaries, For loops, and Functions. Looking over the syllabus, we seem to have skipped over floating point numbers, tuples, and while loops. I brought this to Gemini's attention, so we'll cover that in our next lesson.
The next lesson will cover more reading and writing files, error handling, introduction to Python libraries, and using pip to install libraries. So far, I have been working in a shell account to which I subscribe. I do worry that some of the libraries won't be available and I won't be able to download new ones. If that happens, I'll need to move my practice to my local computer. I don't like adding cruft to my computer.
The first day of lessons consisted of learning variables, data types, user input, and conditional logic. These are the most basic components of any language. With just this you can write some very basic scripts. This is the boring, yet necessary, stuff that put me off from learning all this time.
The Python lessons in Gemini are relatively short and very basic. This works for me as I can advance more quickly and avoid mental burnout that happens when you sit around thinking hard for hours. After each lesson, I still have mental energy in reserve.
I read somewhere that people generally only have about four hours of hard productivity in them each day. Beyond that, people aren't as effective. This is true of both hunter-gatherers and knowledge workers. If you can get four hours of focused effort into your workday, you can be successful. Of course, the problem is the never-ending interruption most jobs entail.
It is a bit worrying that Gemini will soon dump me into the deep end of the swimming pool. After this next lesson, we are going to jump into AI Libraries. Gemini is not fooling around. Swimming in the deep end, I'll need to start supplementing my knowledge of Python, designing projects, and Statistics. It couldn't hurt to figure out how to use git and github.
For now, I'm working through a terminal. But I suspect I'll have to start using something more advanced. There's more to being a developer than knowing how to code. There is a process with which I am not familiar. It's a new adventure.
