Into the Wild of Coding

23 Jan 2015

At first, preparing myself to be lost in this wild appeared inevitable. It has its usual reasons. I was going to try something without any background, not even someone to correct me if I go wrong. Also, dealing with technology souvenirs like GitHub and godzillas like Amazon AWS is no joke. Especially when I know I am an authentic illiterate in this world. I know no programming. I just started out on python. That’s another atypical wild journey. All I have with me is an enormous amount of motivation driven by my friends who show any_time_willingness to introduce me to this brave new worlds.

I used to blog on a lot of emotional, non-interesting topics, basically to either vent off my frustrations or embrace mild satisfactions in life. (I am probably doing that here too.) Or some sort of poetry about nature and feelings, which I still respect doing for some reason.

I never bothered how many people read them. I just wanted to exploit the invincible world of open source. I started off with Blogspot, went on to set myself up with a couple blogs on wordpress and transmigrated my old blog finally to Svbtle. All I was doing was an emotional roller-coaster. What anybody would instantly hate about this ride is, it is dart silent. No noise at all.

The day I started learning programming, I learned my first lesson from my first impressions and experiences. That is, Being to the point. Having learned this, I would go back to my usual blog posts and apply my another learning. That is asking myself one right question: “What’s your point? What do you want to say?”.

Computers are really gentle in this case. They are never so harsh and sarcastic in their reactions. They care and take everything I do seriously irrespective of how silly it may be. They give chances to correct myself indefinitely. But they will not be understanding what I want to say as long as I use language of craving. It understands only when I talk in its language within its vocabulary handling capacity. I instantly saw a great difference in my attitude. My sentences are extremely shortened now. I worry no more about decorating my phrases with classy adjectives. I now know to break long sentences into shorter ones, easy to read.

Logic is all that it takes. It is not easy. But it is essential. I believe now that programming may make me a better thinker. A logical thinker. I am not there yet, I will soon be. At least, now I have my favorite tools that I use at my disposal which I consider a great upgrade of myself.

• I use Atom for a lot of writing material such as this post. Atom and Light Table are currently my favorite editors. PyCharm is currently my favorite IDE.
• I extensively use markdown language for all these posts.
• I am huge fan, follower and user of IPython NoteBook.
• I host my website where my code learning appears on Amazon EC2 instance. I also learned how to setup websites using GitHub Pages
• I use SSH for all my EC2 site maintenance.
• I use Pandoc and nbconvert to convert my markdown files into html.
• I simply love GitHub, Git Gists and NBViewer for their natural complexity, like in a flower.
• The less I speak about matplotlib, the better it is. It is meant for giants, wizards, saints and super coders. It’s what ISS is for NASA. Not meant for common man. But I love doing it at my amateurish pace, thanks to my background in physics and mathematics.
• I regularly take pleasure of visiting noble and impeccable voluntary works such as Roguelynn’s and envy impossible works such as Jake’s.

And a lot of other stuff I am not keeping here. I am sure those very few leftouts in this world, who are as weak as I am in this field, will surely find this post very encouraging and informative. At least for me, this is a track record to evaluate myself.

I am already enjoying coding, without really learning much of it yet.