Old Man Learns to Code

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...