First impressions and thoughts on Ruby

I honestly didn't think that the societal pressures of posting daily--not that anyone's really policing--will make me be serious about coding my one hour per day. And if I'm going to be even more honest, I have been logging 2 to 4 hours daily instead of one. I'm enjoying coding in Python too much. It's a different kind of high compared to the effect of a good session of pole-dancing, with neither being better than the other. I just love expanding the things I can do with it.

To anyone who's wondering, no, I didn't start from scratch. I learned the basics of Python several years ago, also last year, and then I took a refresher early this year. Yes, I took the beginner classes twice before but never really got the will to move forward. 

This is where I'm positive that the #100DaysOfCode challenge really helps. After I passed the basics portion of this current course, I realised I've been pulling around two hours or more to apply the things I have learned. So last week, I decided to just take the plunge and not really overthink this.

Apart from making the 10 Python apps that are included in learning Python, I have also been actively creating my own programs as another way to exercise my brain. 

In the past week, I ended up creating my own Weather app that sends me a text message of the weather in Celsius, and just now a web map program that retrieves data of eateries/food carts from the New York City website and plots it into a map. Two very simple applications that have real-life, practical use. 

Weather App that texts me

Web App that loads all the eateries and food carts from the NYC Parks and Recreation website

After I finished App #2 from my course, I chose between sleeping or giving this personal project a headstart. It was late on a Sunday, and as bad impulsive decisions go, of course I chose to tinker with this. I must say though, it's great that the US and New York, in general, have data repositories for just about anything under the sun. Alas, I didn't really get a chance to prep and cleanse the data. While this web mapping program is working, it's not as fast as it should be. I'm flagging this as another WIP so I can improve the runtime and to add more information variables.\

For this app, I used folium (for mapping), Nominatim (for geocoding), and got the data from the New York City Parks and Recreation department website.

Facts derived from this exercise
Number of food carts/eateries with permit: 237
Number of properly maintained addresses for these permits: 114 

My biggest frustration from coding in SAP ABAP in my former career life was that the programs I was creating mostly helped corporations. The programs I used to create revolved around Finance/Accounting/Sales and Distribution/HR/Materials Management (you see, even typing this severely bores me) and at the end of the day, I'm still just helping solve a corporation's bottom line, with a very minuscule impact.

Rant aside, I'm excited to be on this current path. At the rate I'm going with 2 applications (of 10) per week, I will likely finish the course in 4 weeks. By then, I'd need to either do personal projects or take another course. Suggestions are welcome!

I'm finally doing it. 

1/100: I almost didn't want to start because of how vulnerable it makes me feel to document this online. I'm committing to learn every day for 100 days.

As a former SAP ABAP dev, I'm constantly amazed at how much more efficient #Python is. #100DaysOfCode #jennevercodes #WIP pic.twitter.com/hY5refNSjA

— Jen Pelaez (@jenndpelaez) March 29, 2021

During the height of Covid-19 lockdowns, I was always anxious and conscious about using all the newfound free time for something more sensible than binge-watching TV. After much planning on when to start (so I can end at a date that's significant to me) and then foiling said plans because work and life are still very much a thing, I finally went for it last night. Since I pressed that Tweet button, I have butterflies fluttering in my stomach.

I chose Python because there are so many things that it can do. Many programs you see out there, whether web-based or in a mobile app are coded with Python as the underlying language. Over time, this language has also been getting a bigger share of programmers using it. That's important because that means the language and all the IDEs and tools will all continuously improve.

And not really high up on the list, but another reason is because a lot of the built-in modules were built using C-Language, which was my language of choice back in college. Not that I'm still familiar with it now. Sometimes, it's nice to have that continuity.

Not going to lie, I'm still experiencing a lot of difficulties figuring out how to structure my syntaxes. It's definitely a big shift from coding in SAP ABAP, which is very much line-by-line. There was an object-oriented side to ABAP which is more similar to Python, but I didn't really go deep with it because of how complicated it gets in SAP. Python, on the other hand, makes everything looks so easy. Gone are the days where I have to write long lines of code to remove unwanted characters from a string. In Python, I can do that by merely typing exactly 8 characters + the character I want to remove. 

This example is very specific because I wracked my head trying to code the way I've been used to from the recent years, only to find out that all I had to do was to add .strip() 

It's too early to say. I'm in Day 1 and today about to start my Day 2 exercise. *crossing fingers*