Programming – Two years later, thoughts.

When the Pandemic started in March 2020 I decided to use the opportunity to increase my programming skills, started many various online lessons and so on. During that time I would say my skills were improved but not really useful, so I would learn more, and more. Two plus years, 5 programming languages, 4-6 frameworks and I wouldn’t change a thing about my last couple years of steady skills learning. What I have noticed was at around year two things started to ‘click’ for all of them, the decision to focus on Python over PHP was the biggest leap. Python seemed to teach more ‘General’ programming techniques that really helped even the other languages out.

PHP has so many uses for me daily due to my many websites and always needing something new, but Python was ‘I want to learn that but I don’t know why exactly’. I believe Python being so well rounded really attracted me and the huge amount of constantly updated and new study material right now is amazing. PHP was much harder to find ‘up to date’ things to study without some serious searching, but I still do that too.

So yea I have been increasing my skills with multiple languages at the same time, it does get confusing at times and I have created things where I will miss match syntax. Just the other day in Python I did this below:

# This is me creating a Python super class, brain fart this actually happened and I saw VSC showing the 'red' filename meaning some error. 
# See the mistake? { } a little PHP kicked in even Javascript

class Datasort: {
    def __init__(self, data, dilter):
        print('Doing stuff...')
}

#  Oh here is the most common mix up I do for comments using PHP //Python comments or vice versa lol

If you have checked out any of the various posts with PHP or Python code snippets or learning posted here, almost all of them have been upgraded. I still have lots of rough edges, but learning speed is a tad faster. My best tip while doing some lesson online is to follow along until you pass the tests, then take that code and export it to your own code editor and remake your own all new stuff a few times.

Toughest things to me so far were, recursion, oop in Python goes much deeper than others. Things I finally really learned, Regular Expressions which has been studied but not digested well up until 2022. Regex is also a once you learn the ‘patterns’ aka the confusing looking stuff ‘ pattern = r”^(1|8|9)(\d{10})$” ‘ in one language you pretty much know it for any, but each language has different built in functions to show matches or that do searches for your patterns.