It’s Sunday, which means blog time. I want to say thank you to everyone who has subscribed, it means a lot to me. I’d still write this blog even no one was reading but it’s so cool that people are reading it. Quick life update: I've returned all of my equipment to my old job and have started packing up my room. Now to buy more luggage and schedule a Covid-19 test.

This week I started the Sweat app challenge, it’s a six-week challenge with workouts that are new to the app. (I promise this relates to my programming). I decided to do a different workout program than I normally do, which is easy since the app has loads. It's been a few weeks since I've consistently exercised due to losing my job and spraining my thumb so I felt like the smar thing to do was Starting Out level. At first I felt thought, this will be super easy, I’ll just get back into things and switch to the harder Challenge Me level. I did my first workout and I nearly cried. It was so hard. They were simple, basic exercises but they definitely felt challenging. After my first week of Starting Out, I’m glad that I’m doing it.

So what does this have to do with coding? Well, it’s simple. Choosing the easier, beginner level made me think that maybe I should do another beginner Python specialisation on Coursera. I’ve been doing a lot of programming with Exercism, working on different little challenges and such, but I wanted to make sure I really had my basics down. A lot of the information in the course is stuff I already know, but every now and then I learn something not only new, but also extremely important. For example, I learned about aliases where essentially you have two different variables but they’re both pointing to the same object and if you change one variable, you end up changing the object so both variables are changed. That is important to know and I wouldn’t have known it if I didn’t do this course. Don’t get me wrong, the videos are mildly mind numbing but the extra practice and the new knowledge do make it worth it. This is still me though, so I do get extremely frustrated when the quiz doesn't give me 100% when doing something extremely simple.

I started the Python 3 Programming specialisation on Tuesday and I’m already done with one course. Hopefully by the time I write my next post next Sunday, I will have finished another course or two. I’m buying some books to continue my programming once my Coursera subscription is up sometime in February (I think). My old company paid for a year’s subscription and I’m really glad that they did, it's been a great starting point for me. With the books, I will hopefully be able to complete some small projects to add to my GitHub that will showcase my skills. Despite everything, this year is turning out to personally be pretty okay so far. I can’t wait to see how much I'll grow this year.

Till next time,
Cope.