After “Hello World”
Learning to code after the basic tutorials
For me, learning how to program has been marked with a few starts and stops. A few years ago, I finished the basic python tutorials that gave me a great grasp of Python’s foundational concepts. However, I was confused about where to go from there. I wasn’t even really sure where I was trying to go. I thought how could I apply these concepts so that I could make something relevant to my interests.
I’ve heard other budding programmers talk about being “stuck” and I wanted to share actionable tactics that would allow them to go beyond just the basics and create code that was relevant to themselves.
Find a project that interests you
While it might sound simple, one of the easiest ways to lose interest in learning something new is to fail to see how it’s relevant to you. The best way to make sure that doesn’t happen is to come up with the project yourself. Are you interested in alternative transportation? New York’s Citi Bike bike-sharing program has data available. Want to see if there’s any correlation between that program and NYC subway ridership? There’s data available for that. Not into data science? Mess around with your favorite application’s API (application programming interface). If you’re still unsure about where to start, I’ve included some resources at the bottom of this article to spark your imagination.
Stick with it
Personally, I’m a long-suffering Knicks fan interested in NBA stats. I was curious to see if there was any correlation between the Knicks’ payroll and their standings in the Eastern Conference. To do that, I had to create my own NBA winning percentage-team salary database. I had to find the relevant data, scrape it using BeautifulSoup, clean formatting errors, merge multiple datasets using Pandas until I had a working database and plot that data using Matplotlib. It’s in the course of a project that you discover all of the things that could go wrong in a seemingly simple endeavor. Every time you fix a bug you learn a little bit more. It could take a while but since you have a strong passion for the subject matter, you’ll be more likely to see the project all the way to the end.
Be ‘OK’ with what you don’t know
Rather than overwhelm yourself with all there is to know in programming, you can use StackOverflow, Google, etc. to find out what skills are relevant to the type of project you’re interested in completing. Instead of just reading the documentation, you’ll actually be applying what you learn and that’s the best way to go about understanding a new concept.
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Resources
- Programming Foundations with Python (https://www.udacity.com/course/ud036)
- Data Wrangling with MongoDB (https://www.udacity.com/course/ud032)
- CS-109 Data Science (http://cs109.github.io/2015/)
- Compiling and plotting NBA data (https://git.io/v2oJb)
