It was Black Friday of 2015. O’Reilly put on a sale of their programming ebooks and I was finally ready to take the plunge and learn Python. I bought three books:

I then signed up for a Coursera class, Python for Everybody, taught by Dr. Charles Severance and started the class. I was ready to do this. I needed a hobby. I had a problem to solve.

Then real life got in the way. A few months earlier, we started building a new house. In January it was time to sell our house, which meant hours of work. Then in February, we moved.

I put learning Python on the back burner. Before I knew it, it was July, and another six months had gone by. It was now fantasy football season and that was the problem I had to solve. I needed a program that would keep track of all football statistics and standings and automatically calculate each player’s points. It was time.

I re-started the Coursera course and spent the time. I was easily spending twenty hours a week reading the course materials, watching the videos and doing the homework.

I confirmed what I knew about myself: I learn best by doing, not just reading or watching videos. The books I had bought were helpful, but just sitting down and reading them, trying to follow along and do the exercises was difficult. Python for Everybody on Coursera was great.

I finished that and moved on to Python Jumpstart by Building 10 Apps by Michael Kennedy, which I had purchased in early 2016 via a Kickstarter campaign. I’m almost done with that a year after I started this journey.

Learning to code in Python is hard. I don’t have a background in computer science and with some of the concepts that the books and courses teach I just don’t have the base knowledge necessary. This sometimes makes it harder and takes longer to understand the concepts. I’m lucky that my wife has worked professionally as a programmer in multiple languages, including Java and SQL. But I drive her crazy when I ask her questions about concepts I clearly don’t understand. I use the wrong terminology or fail to grasp what I’ve been taught.

I don’t know how much I’ve retained from the classes and books. I’m trying to build my application in parallel with my learning. I’m convinced the only way I’m going to learn is to build something, which is a piece of advice most often found online for people aspiring to learn programming. I’m constantly hitting up Google and Stack Overflow when I get stuck. I’ll copy bits and pieces of code from these search results and I’m always doubting whether I understand what I’m copying. I’ve signed up for multiple newsletters and bookmarked dozens of websites with articles on how to learn, code snippets, programming challenges and more. I’m overwhelmed with the concepts I’m learning and I know I don’t understand, let alone use, these concepts.

But I’m going to keep trying. The only way I’ll learn is by building something. The code will be ugly. It will break. And I’ll keep updating it until it works and as I learn more, I’ll make it more elegant.

Here’s to another year.