100 Days of code – 5% complete

Hello world!

I’m Donald Hohenstein, and I started the 100 days of code challenge on November 1st, 2018. For those of you who don’t know about 100 days of code, you can find more info here:
https://www.100daysofcode.com/

I’ve always wanted to learn how to program, but I haven’t really made it a long term priority. But from now until February 8th, 2019, I’m going to code for 1 hour every single day and post my progress on Twitter and GitHub. I’m also going to try to post updates here every 5 days.

Prior to starting this challenge, I had taken a course on C and a course on Fortran in college. I also played around with some bash scripting, some TI-83+ calculator BASIC, and some basic HTML/Javascript. I completed the Python 2.7 course on Codecademy a few years ago, wrote some basic Python scripts for work, and practiced Python with Project Euler. I’m not a programming expert by any means, but I could write some simple Python programs with a lot of research and effort.

My goal with this challenge is to get good enough with Python that it’s worth the programming time to automate a task that I’d normally spend an hour on once per week, or a 4 hour task that I’d normally have to do once a month. Right now, it takes me about 5-8 hours of coding to reliably automate one of those tasks, and that’s just not worthwhile when I have a deadline. I’m hoping that by forcing myself to go through the same challenges over and over, I’ll get better and faster at coding.

I have been coding every single day for the past 5 days, and it hasn’t really gotten easier yet. I’ll code for an entire hour, feel like I made a lot of progress, then I’ll look at my entire file and realize I only wrote about 10 lines of code. I had one day where I only wrote code for 30 minutes, then I debugged my code for 2 full hours. However, I’m still making progress, and I can feel myself getting better at coding, even if I can’t see my progress yet.

I’ll post another update in 5 days. Until then, you can follow me on Twitter @donald_codes, or review my progress log on GitHub here: https://github.com/dghohens/100-days-of-code/blob/master/log.md