An attempt at something new…

So I think I have decided to learn programming. This is a unique irony because without a programming class that I took nothing from in high school, I wouldn’t have the limited depth of knowledge I have of web design now. Irony. But is has been the web and how I’ve wanted to more without knowing how to express it or begin to try because of my aforementioned limited knowledge. At one point this actually led me to think about beginning to learn PHP, but the resources I could find seemed to require a base level of programming understanding that I didn’t possess. Please note: I took nothing from the high school class. To be fair I may have been my own worst enemy and not have given myself a chance to really try and may have given up far to easily. But for now I’ll keep blaming it on something else, it makes the rest of this sound better. Fast forward a few years past my false start into PHP to a new web with these things called Podcasts and it is here that my desire to learn programming has been rekindled.

I’ve been listening to the TWiT network for the last few years and have recently been listening to the Open Source offering, FLOSS Weekly. As the title implies it profiles software and personalities in the Open Source community. Admittedly it didn’t grab my interest initially but I’ve recently put it back on the iPod and have found myself making it a regular on the playlist. I guess it was the Ruby on Rails birthday episode that really piqued my interest in programming again. But I still told myself that I just didn’t have what it takes or that it would still be too much of a gap to overcome to get started. The episode 11 rolled around in which Leo and DiBona profiled Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python. They did the hows, wheres, and whys of Python which was very cool, but then they did the obligatory, “And for people who want to learn?”, and while I listened it wasn’t something I thought was relevant until they started describing some of the guides for newbies and I think van Rossum basically said, “and it someone is completely new to programming…”, and as you can imagine I was listening. I think it was during that part of the conversation that Leo mentioned that he uses Python as a starting point into programming for his daughter and if I was listening before I was hooked now.

Work has been keeping me plenty busy. In fact I started this post a couple of weeks ago and it wasn’t until earlier tonight that I downloaded the Python setup. So it may not be an all-day, all-night project but I’m at least going to give a decent go to something that I could really have a good time with and be able to use. We’ll see how it goes from here, and as much as I think about it I’ll update my progress here. Who knows, maybe I’ll become super-coder and learn to actually do neat stuff with my website!