Alright folks, lemme tell you about this thing I kicked off on April 3rd, 2024. Called it “45 days from 4/3/24” – real original, I know! Basically, I wanted to see what I could build, learn, or just plain do in a solid 45-day sprint.
Phase 1: The Setup (Days 1-7)
- First things first, I needed a goal. I decided to finally tackle learning some Python. Always heard it was the bee’s knees for automation and scripting, and that’s been on my to-do list for ages.
- Grabbed a Udemy course. Yeah, I know there’s tons of free stuff, but I learn better with structured lessons. Found a decent one on Python for beginners.
- Installed Python, VS Code (seemed like everyone was using it), and a bunch of extensions I didn’t understand yet. The setup alone took a whole evening!
Phase 2: Learning the Ropes (Days 8-21)
- Went through the course, chapter by chapter. Honestly, the first few days were a slog. Variables, loops, functions… my brain felt like it was melting.
- Started doing the little coding challenges in the course. Failed a bunch, Googled a lot, and slowly, very slowly, things started to click.
- Built a simple calculator app. Nothing fancy, just addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Felt like a major accomplishment at the time!
Phase 3: Real-World Application (Days 22-35)
- Okay, time to stop just learning and start doing. I wanted to automate something in my life.
- Decided to write a script that would automatically download my favorite comics from a website. Manually downloading them every week was a pain.
- Spent a whole weekend wrestling with web scraping libraries (Beautiful Soup, Requests – you name it!). Got really frustrated, almost gave up a couple of times.
- Finally got it working! My script now downloads the comics every Monday morning. Best feeling ever!
Phase 4: Polish and Share (Days 36-45)
- Cleaned up my comic downloader script. Added some error handling, made it more user-friendly.
- Learned about Git and GitHub. Pushed my script to a public repository. Felt kinda proud.
- Wrote a simple “readme” file explaining what the script does and how to use it.
What I Learned
- Python is pretty cool! Still got a long way to go, but I can see why people rave about it.
- Web scraping is a pain in the butt, but incredibly powerful.
- Even small automation tasks can save you a ton of time in the long run.
- Sharing your code with the world is a little scary, but also really rewarding.
Next Steps
- Keep learning Python. Dive deeper into specific libraries and frameworks.
- Find more ways to automate tasks in my life.
- Contribute to open-source projects.
So yeah, that was my 45-day sprint. It wasn’t perfect, but I learned a lot and actually built something useful. Definitely gonna do this again!