This year I decided to pursue the goal of learning to code. For a long time now I have wanted to learn coding but as with many things it is life that for one reason or another gets in the way. I will not go into details but this year I am making some changes to the way I earn money and it will allow to pursue other things.
After discovering cryptocurrency last year I had s realization that I had found my calling. Everything about this ecosystem deeply resonates with my very soul. As I have been trading for a number of years I found that the only skill I had that was relevant to the space was that of trading. While this is financially a great skill to have I needed more involvement in this industry that is sure to grow exponentially in the coming years.
So I turned to programming. Although I knew this would be a long painful journey that would not work financially for a long time, I still had to do it. The first step was deciding what language I should learn first. Well I wanted to do blockchain so maybe Solidity? Probably not a good idea to start with a language that specializes in one thing so I looked towards the more traditional languages.
After much research I finally settled on Python. Now I'm sure that to many this would have been a very predictable choice and I can see why.
Python is easy to understand, forgiving, has a vast community and is as flexible as a Russian gymnast. Naturally a great choice for beginners.
Next I has to decide how I was going to learn. Would I opt to take a structured course and probably learn a lot faster, or would I opt to troll the internet consuming all of the free information out there and structure my own learning. Well of course I was going to teach myself, and so off I go on my home-schooled developer journey.
So far getting the basics down has been fluid and interesting. I found it logical and intuitive, two things that were mentioned frequently while researching languages. It reads very easily and doesn't require a whole load of typing.
I have had a great time writing simple applications that run in the terminal and watching my code execute the way I instruct it to. While I still have a long way to go in mastering the standard Python library I have begun exploring other modules that have relevance to my future goals as a developer.
Modules like Pandas and Matplotlib for data analysis and graphing are two that I am currently focusing on the most. One issue that I have come across here is that in the 14 years since leaving school, my math skills are not quite as sharp as they once were. Nevertheless I shall continue to learn and improve as I shape myself in a quality developer.
Currently my goal is developing for finance as it is an area I have a passion for but as time goes on I like the idea of machine learning and also AI. I am but at the start of this journey and I do not know where it will end. I realize that Python does have it limitations and that in the future I will benefit from other languages but for now it will do just fine.
If there is anybody out there in a similar situation, just starting out I love to hear what your experience has been like and what your plans are for the future. Coding is certainly very interesting and that I have begun I wish I had started sooner.
