In Less Than 100 Days
Because it’s the start of the weekend, just a quick resource post for you all.
Today I’ve been going through this course: 100 Days of Python.
It’s a set of free tutorials that you can go through pretty quickly. (It recommends each lesson is 25 minutes or so and you do one a day; really, the lessons take about 10 minutes each and so with an hour, you’re bringing that around to the two-week mark. I’m a bit obsessive about these things. Your experience may vary.)
Now, my reason for doing it is that, while I can do some pretty advanced stuff in Python, I’ve only ever really learned in a “hands on, do what you need to do” way. I have some big projects that I’m working on, and my fundamentals just aren’t at the point I want them to be.
With programming, you have a few elements, and really, it boils down to sets of dynamic lists that you manipulate via instructions. If you’re like me, and you’ve only learned Python to the extent that it does the stuff you want, then you’re constantly fighting against the fact that with every project, you have to learn something else.
While computer language is a set of very simple instructions, it can get very complicated, very quickly. Sometimes I’ve spent days on writing a piece of code only to stumble upon a simpler concept that reduces it all down to a few lines.
So, with that said, I’m learning the fundamentals all over again.
I recommend doing so, because while most programming stuff is centred, quite rightfully, on people who are pro-programmers or want to be, programming as an amateur for various projects and in various niches is one skill that allows you to massively skew the effort/reward (or time) ratio in your favour.
And I say this as a guy who accidentally stumbled on a way to use very simple Python code to create a program that’s made thousands of pounds using code that I painstakingly wrote out by hand as a set of endless if…then statements because I didn’t even know how to use dictionaries. (For those of you who don’t know anything about programming, that’s something you learn in the first few days.)
To this day, that project earns me passive income. (Yes, passive… I don’t do anything for it.) And there’s still no competition whatsoever because the use-case is laughably niche.
So basically, there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit. Speaking of fruit, simple Python scripts and a Raspberry Pi and some hosing will allow you to automate a greenhouse or garden watering system. Which kind of proves my point.
Anyway, give it a go if you like – we’ll be returning to this subject more seriously in the future. (Possibly even in the Vault, because programming is a core curriculum skill for Black Hat Life Hacking.)