In which this English major gets with the program.

Greetings, Earthlings.

I created this blog for the non-computer-science people who are currently learning how to code.

I studied English in college. Unlike most of my peers, I didn't have any plans to become a lawyer or teacher. I just wanted to get paid to read and write. After graduation, I moved to New York and managed to find a job that would let me do just that. Sounds like a happy ending, no? Not quite.

About a year and a half ago, I was laid off from my copywriting gig at what I thought was my dream job/company. I found another job in less than a month, but it awakened a formerly dormant part of my mind that grew and grew until it became a looming question: Wasn't it time I took control of my future?

Since I've always wondered what makes the Internet so magically addictive, I decided to learn how to program. Thanks to the plethora of online courses out there (most of them free!) it's easy for anyone with a laptop and an Internet connection to get started.

Python was my first introduction to the world of programming. Coursera offers a series of great Rice University courses: Intro to Interactive Programming in Python, Principles of Computing and Algorithmic Thinking. Warning: the third course is really challenging! But it's definitely worth trying...even if it makes you want to bang your head against the wall at times.

After that was over, I signed up for a Udemy course and learned some Javascript and PHP. That's when I really began to appreciate Python. It just makes more sense to me than other languages.

I created this blog to document my attempt to learn how to recreate Eat Decisive using Django and deploy it on Heroku. I am using this Django tutorial to get started.

Throughout my journey, I've read and will continue to read countless tutorials and Stack Overflow answers that have helped me immensely. Some of the tutorials I came across were written for people who were more experienced than little ol' me. It was frustrating at times, kind of like when you look a word up in the dictionary and the definition contains another word you don't know. With that in mind, some of my blog posts will be way too basic for many people. But those same basic posts will probably help other people who are in the same boat as me. So with that latter group in mind, I will try my best to share whatever information I acquire along the way, without assuming much prior knowledge.

Join me as I navigate the world of programming with a side of gifs and puns (I can't ignore my inner humanities major too much). Lots of fun times ahead.