Wow! Actually, my exact words were “Oh my gaad!” or something; that was what I said when I started the next section at the start of my Freecodecamp journey – HTML elements. My surprise was at the big resources page called Let’s Explore the Universe of Programming which seems to have a ton of links to loads of free programming books and even free University courses!
This blog post is being written in the time I’ve set aside for “learning to code”. The philosophy I picked up from a Youtube video that featured Freecodecamp was to aim to do 25 minutes of coding a day; and to do 3 days in a row. Then 3 weeks in a row and then 3 months in a row. This is especially if you really want to code but you are finding it hard to get started or to focus etc.
It’s the first day of my second block of 3 days and I still haven’t actually done any coding yet! But, I have installed Gitter on my smartphone and joined the chatroom for Freecodecamp (don’t forget the Facebook page and the local clubs list with links to the Cardiff and Chepstow clubs and the FCC subreddit). So, in my last few minutes I am going to look at the first proper tutorial (which looks pretty easy if you’ve done lots of HTML before).
But I will definitely be going back and looking at the free Uni courses linked via FCC. But next I have to join the forum. And check The Changelog – a podcast all about opensource.
Ooh! Almost forgot to link the Github Readme on the main page.
Flask is a Python web framework – I haven’t yet tried it myself. After trying Django with the Django Girls tutorial (actually, I haven’t completed the last proper section yet – Django Forms). From what I’ve read about Flask it sounds like it is smaller and more “Pythonic”. For a definition of that word, the Secret Weblog recommends that you type import this into a Python interpreter.. I just tried it and it works.
The video is a very nicely paced talk about how to write a great programming blog (or any other topic really). It’s at PyCon 2016 in Portland, Oregon. He really takes his time and has great slides that simplify what he’s talking about. The Youtube description also has links to the actual slides on Github too.
It’s 27:00 minutes long roughly and it has great audio with the speaker in the corner of the screen to leave room for the slides. He uses a classic teaching structure:
tell them what you’re going to tell them
tell them
tell them what you’ve told them
I personally found it very inspiring as I have been publishing blogs since 2005 (e.g. such as this short post written by myself from almost exactly 11 years ago that links to an intriguing article by George Monbiot about choosing a career). Sometimes I may spend hours over one blog post so it’s great to hear someone describing blog posts as articles or essays.
At the end of the talk he provides a bit.ly link that takes you to his essay about writing great content (which I’ve not read yet). He provides some great yet simple ideas such as reading articles all the way to the end and asking yourself whether it was an effective article or not. The main idea behind the talk is that he provides techniques, concepts and structures that will help if you write blogs but struggle to find the time etc.
Don’t forget, for those feeling a bit visual, there is always Pinterest to get completely lost in. Here is what you get if you search for Python on Pinterest.
You may write some code that is only intended to be used as a module for another program. So if you try running the module directly you may well get no output or response. But, if you include the code below
if __name__ == " __main__ " :
and if you include some functionality to this function, you will get some handy output. It means you can run a module as its own program. You could get it to give some instructions about the correct use of the actual program or use it as an example of what the main program is supposed to do.
If we’re to talk about Django and Python then we cannot ignore Django Girls and their excellent tutorial. I have followed it all except the very last section. The tutorial enabled me to build a blog on PythonAnywhere.