My First (baby) Step

Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.

— Oscar Wilde.

Thanks Oscar, I think I’ll keep your quote in my first post!

So First Post, BIIIGG Picture. Let’s not waste anymore time and get into it.

Without going into too much detail, I managed to land myself an IT job in a bank. It is a graduate program that’s specially designed for fresh graduates to join the IT industry with or without a relevant degree (Comp Sci, Comp Eng, etc.) Having graduated with an Environmental Degree, I discovered my distaste for this industry 2/3 years into my Bachelor’s program. After working at a startup as my first job for 3 months, I quit and subsequently joined this graduate program.

The problem is that I had ZERO IT background when I first joined the company. I had no clue how the tools that I use on a daily basis work. I was basically thrown into the deep part of the pool. And I have no complaints, because I signed up for it.

Because of job requirements and my innate curiosity, I decided that I have to pick up some programming skills. I dabbled with programming by first learning Python through LPTHW book, and got exposed to HTML, CSS and JavaScript through FreeCodeCamp. Unfortunately, I never had the courage to work on a project on my own. Even the simple HTML projects on the FreeCodeCamp gave me so much trouble that I gave it all up. I stopped learning coding a few months into it and just drifted. I just showed up at work, doing basic tasks, drifting away…

I knew I had to change. I have to learn programming and work on projects of my own. I am after all in a graduate program designed to groom future IT leaders. For my career ahead, I have no choice but to learn programming.

Listening to successful self-taught programmers, one important attribute to their success is their focus on practicality. Sure, watching online lectures is easy. Learning about the story of Linux creation is fun. Typing out easy programs like print(“Hello World”) is easy and makes you feel accomplished. Sure.

But at the end of the day, you don’t actually learn. Learning happens when you are forced to do something on your own. It happens when you are forced to take your own path and take responsibility for any problem or success that you encounter. I lacked that. Not anymore.

To master coding, I need to immerse myself in it. I need to document my learning. I need to be consistent. I need to work on projects that I can call my own.

The end goal of this phase of my journey is to create a web app of my own.

Yesterday, I learnt how to use google api to interact with google sheets locally using python. Great!

Today, I start a couple of Flask tutorial. Though I know enough to make a webpage appear normal using python files, I still need to better learn the hierarchy of the many different modules involved in the creation of a web app.

I’m getting tired now. I will update again later when I’m freshened up.