First baby steps

So the hardest thing to know is: Where to start?, and I’ve been quite confused about this myself, I know that the worst thing to do is doing nothing at all. But working without a clear purpose of what I was looking for, has made my road towards a change of career a little bumpy.

When I was still wanting a career as a Physics, I heard about Python, and wanted to learn it, I already knew some C and a lot of Mathematica. But I wanted to learn Fortran or Python. The first one, because everyone was saying that: all physics use it from the beginning of Physics programming and since most of the Physics research was made in Fortran, it was a must and you would be looked down on if you didn’t know it (So False!!). It was also not friendly at all because it was designed for punch cards, so I guess that a lot of those Physics that used it were stubborn and didn’t want to learn a new language. And I wanted to learn Python because it was what cool kids with Fedora Linux would use, and I was an Ubuntu user wanting to be cool.

Unfortunately, this was at a time when there weren’t so many tutorials and documentation on the internet, so it was easy to get frustrated and scared even before you could do the “Hello world” program, just by getting it installed with all its libraries. Back in those days, it wasn’t just to download it and double click to install, there were more steps, steps that as a beginner you didn’t understand and could easily get wrong.

My next attempt was when I was starting to date my now fiance, and told him about this wish of learning python, and he recommended me Django Girls tutorial. They also organize some workshops but you must apply and they give preference to women without a college education. I did the first part that is an introduction to Python, but failed at completing the tutorial, I think that I was lazy about installing the Django library and wasn’t exactly excited about doing a blog (Oh the irony!).

A couple of years later at my current job, I was given the task to find out how much money the company had paid to some constructions companies to built real state developments, it sounds easy but there are around 2,500 houses between all the real state developments. Eventually, I got the answer, but I had to make this huge Excel files that are slower because of the amount of information.

One day after finishing one of this files, I came home to my fiance and ask him, how could it be done better, because there was a lot of information repeating, but I needed it that way for my formulas to work. And he talked to me about SQL and normalization of databases, I didn’t understand what he was talking. But then we saw a video about this technique, and I decided I needed to learn SQL.

First I learned it by reading and making notes of the book “SQL in 24 Hours, Sams Teach Yourself” by Ryan Stephens, which I read online by borrowing a friend’s account of Safari Books, then I saw in Coursera the course: “SQL for Data Science”, and I enrolled, I almost completed it but, most of the course only required you to type the correct code in a box, and the final project required me to know a programming language so that I could build my database from the Yelp dataset, so I failed, but I’m still planning on doing that project after I get better at programming with Python.

Next, I tried again to learn Python by following the book Head First Python by Paul Barry, but before I finished learning about ordered data, the Laboratoria summon started, and I thought I had a better chance of changing my career with them. I applied and spend the next weeks learning some javascript by following the ebook Eloquent Javascript (which I don’t think it’s for beginners, even if my fiance thinks otherwise).

May came, and with it an email from Laboratoria telling me I was rejected, to be honest, it was a longshot applying there because their goal is empowering women with no college education, and I think you get extra points if you are a single mother, who I am not.

So after the rejection, I enrolled in the “Programming for Everybody” Specialization, also in Coursera, and I successfully finished it, I may not have a Certification for the Capstone, but that is because I am stingy, and finished all the assignments in less than 5 weeks, so that I wouldn’t be charged another month, but the course staff isn’t thrilled about people like me who rush through the material, and they delayed my last assigment’s grade.

The good news is, that right now I have a lot of material, plans about what to do next, and I am excited to see how much will I accomplish in a year from now. My next step is to learn the hard way (today arrived my new book “Lear PYTHON 3 the HARD WAY” by Zed A. Shaw).

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