Old Man Learns to Code

 When it comes to coding in Python, I thought I wouldn't have to sweat the small stuff. I was wrong. Every little move involves small stuff. My trickled-in thought was simple enough: Create a template, in the form of a comment, that identifies positions in a list by their index numbers. This way I wouldn't have to hand count them each time. I could just position the template above or below a print out of my list object and determine that way, the index of each item in a list of same-sized items. And of course, the template should be easily generated using the range() function rather than me tediously fashioning it by hand. NOT so !!! Realized after the fact that the integers 0 to 9 are single digit while 10-99 are two digits. And if I had lists of 100-999 that would be 3 digits each. So outputs of the print statements are not inherently spaced apart evenly!  It was supposed to come out like this (the first two lines and not the last one): # 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07...

  If you read yesterday's post ( here ), you probably thought this Old Man (who is supposedly devoting time to learning to code) is starting to fall for all that click bait floating about on the internet. (Or as some may call it, propaganda .) No. I'm not. Not fully that is. I understand the game. Everyone is trying to make the internet their side hustle  . Each thinks they will get 8+ billion clicks (current population of Planet Earth). Multiply that by whatever Google ad sense pays per click and it will make you fabulously rich . But that is not why I'm posting here, out in the open. Instead this is merely my public journal. I also have a private Obsidian journal  ( More re Ob Journaling is here ) (BTW, Make-a-Meme web site is a fun diversion for creating my right side images here.) So where am I in terms of learning Python? At this point I have a bunch of parallel projects. And yes, I'm committing them to GitHub . Not yet a maven in version control technology (VC...

 I'm reading all over the internet that coding is dead. Why bother doing it the hard way, when you can fake it? Let an AI Bot do it for you and then pretend you did it? It's called "vibe coding". It means never having to say, "I did something," ever again. According to this YouTuber we are being trained to be dumbed down automatons. Still looking for the book though, "Brave New AI-Vibed World" . Is it out yet? Post Script Just finished reading Yuval Harari's book, " Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind " (10th yr edition). In it he poses that human civilizations are built around mass-adopted fictions (e.g., religions, political ideologies, economic ideologies, etc.). In the epilogue he wonders what will happen if AI bots introduce new fictions and convince the masses (the Sapiens) to adopt those artificially generated fictions? Scary. See also, " Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow ". More to Explore Brave New AI-World ...

Some folk say you should find one good teacher or one good course and stick with it. My view on that is rubbish. You need to buzz around and take from each source what is most useful to you. Take learning about Git and GitHub for example. I fished around and finally found Programing with Mosh as my initial savior. He explains everything bit by bit and slowly. Good for an old geezer like me. But good as his tutorial may be, there were some confusing aspects; at least for me. See, I started using PyCharm as my IDE while Mosh uses VS Code. When you create a "Project" in PyCharm, it generates a project folder with a .venv (virtual environment) folder inside of it. So which folder do I do my $_git_init in? The master one or the included .venv? Confusing. No? However, switching over to Nick White's  Git Tutorial For Dummies , I found one tiny utterance by him that clears up the confusion. He says, "Git is your memory card [boom!]". Mosh never explained that concep...

  Way off topic here. Someone I used to work with just informed of being laid off from a very large and well known high tech company. When something like that happens, it's a gut punch. Especially if you were a super loyal employee, put in the long hours, sang the praises of the company and now they do this to you! Some people laughed when ex-President Joe Biden spoke about workers having dignity because they have a job. How true. When the company you were loyal to throws you out like so much excess trash, you lose all sense of being a useful human being. You lose your dignity. You lose your sense of self worth. A number of recent posts by others lament over the situation . See the below More to Explore. More to Explore Laid Off After 18 Years at Microsoft – The Harsh Reality Microsoft Just Laid Off Thousands AGAIN What the Attacks on DEI Are Really All About | Talking Politics With Mom - Episode 09 OMG --Google Laid off 12K employees ?? Why Are Tech Layoffs Still Happening in 2025...

I'm learning by way of the school of hard knocks that even I, with my very simplistic self-imposed Python project, need help with version control. Let me back up. I created a very simple Python script that asks the user for opinions about various You Tube tutorials, and in the process of collecting answers to queries about the tutorial, starts assembling HTML plus CSS code for posting as a help Tab on my browser. The simple minded script asks the user questions like, 'How many out of 5 stars do you give to the overall quality of this tutorial?' and 'Please copy to the clipboard, the URL of the tutorial and its title'. All these little bits of information get assembled into an HTML/CSS tagged snippet that I want to append to a growing collection of reviews expressed in HTML code. 'Wait a minute,' I said to myself.  (Kudos to Meme-Gen'er) 'Every user input should be tested for validity.' 'And this issue will occur with every future program!...

 Don't worry your pretty print head about it, they say. Just invoke this magic incantation and everything will be fine. Of course, it's never that simple. Today's travail involves creating your own custom code modules and trying to import them into your main flow code. Turns out the Python interpreter does a background scan and fill-in of some sort of namespace dictionaries. And if it doesn't detect your custom module or package, your import statement won't work. I still don't fully understand it all. A good place to start is with this CS professor's explanation:  Explaining the different import methods in Python . As you move along in this back alley of the Python language, you learn it's a good idea to have a Dunder file (not a Dunder "method") named __init__.py incorporated in you custom module or package. One explanation can be found in NeuroNine's YT post here:  Importing Your Own Python Modules Properly The overall trick for learning ...

The nice thing about a blog is that your posts are dated. So it's been just a bit beyond a month since my first post here about a 70+ year old (me) wondering whether he still has enough brain plasticity to learn a new computer programming language --in this case, Python . So far the answer seems to be yes. I've taken many divergent and thus distracting, side roads. For example, re-learning how to do Blogger posts (like this one) with at least one image included just to make it look more interesting than it actually is. More so, a big chunk of my recent time has been consumed learning Obsidian . Beyond that, I've spent time learning about learning techniques .  Accordingly, my Obsidian "vault" has grown to encompass specific topic tags such as "#LP" for Learning Python, "#LO" for Learning Obsidian, "#ZB" for learning about Ztelkasten methods, "#LHcss" for learning more about HTML plus CSS, and "#LJs" for planned f...