On Monday I started a Data Science Immersive course at General Assembly in Melbourne. Up until now my career has been quite varied, but I decided to take a risk and return to the things that originally made me happy: mathematics, programming and storytelling. Luckily, there’s now a career that combines all three.
Before starting, I thought I should brush up on my programming skills because I hadn’t really touched any programming languages in a while and even then I was generally doing front end web development.
I completed the MIT Introduction to Python Programming just before I started this course, so I felt that I refreshed my programming slightly and had a go at Python, which I hadn’t used beforehand.
There were some concepts that initially confused me. Loops, for, while, etc, were straightforward. I’d seen plenty of these throughout my programming days at university and logically, that’s kind of how we complete tasks ourselves.
Eg. For each spoonful of food my toddler puts into her mouth I need to:
- stop the dog from cleaning up her face
- clean up her face myself
- reset the spoon
- repeat.
But I struggled with list and dictionary comprehension in Python. I couldn’t really wrap my head around it, but I recognised that it was faster than loops and so was generally a better approach.
I’d heard that to become an expert in something, you need to practice it 10,000 times and while I’m nowhere close to completing 10,000 Python list and dictionary comprehensions but yesterday it all seemed to click.
It’s satisfying to write what once I would have done in an insane number of nested for loops in a succinct single line of code instead.
So I feel that already I have progressed from where I was in my Python programming last week to now. And that is promising. Surely the only way from here is up?