The idea of running a blog accompanied me from the beginning. It was worse
with the form. I had no idea about the content. What to write, what not to write, etc. So far, I have already run several blogs, but always after some time, there is a problem related to the lack of topics. On this blog, I wanted to avoid this problem, hence I spent more time thinking about what it should look like. Today I know. This post is a starter, so I would like to raise two topics in it: what the blog will be about and how I will run it. At least at the initial stage.
What will this blog be about?
Programming is currently experiencing a real boom. Salary rates spark the imagination and attract many people who want to try a career in IT. On Internet forums and in various groups associated with the subject of IT, some opinions starting in IT is not so easy. With a lot of volunteers and a lot of competition, it’s hard to find the first job. What’s more, high salaries are reserved for employees with extensive experience. For me, it’s not surprising. I don’t know
of an industry where it would be otherwise. At first, “catching” a job with little or no experience is difficult. Over time, it is easier to find another job. The salary is also increasing, although it is true that in most professions it stops somewhere around the national average, and maybe even somewhere between the minimum wage and the national average. This is how the IT market can be described in a nutshell. You can read more about working in IT
in Maciej Aniserowicz’s book “Profession of a Programmer”. I believe that this paragraph almost completely exhausts the characteristics of the IT market, so the blog will not be about it.
I started perversely, but I wanted you to know what I would rather not write about. In this blog, I will focus on the “prose of life”. An old love for programming ignited in me, and this time I thought I’d let it last a little longer than a few months. I have a job, so I can afford a hobby approach to the subject. On the other hand, I would like to be able to write code well for web applications along with the use of machine learning mechanisms to support sales in e-commerce. I have a goal and I have time to reach it. That’s what this blog will be about. About the way from “zero” to … well, we’ll see where this road takes me. I would like this blog to show something more than promises to learn programming in a few weeks and find a job in the next week. Here you will be able to read about the daily work that needs to be done to develop a specific topic.
How will the blog be run?
As a standard, I plan to supplement the blog with a weekly summary. I’m not planning more frequent posts for now, mainly because the blog takes up time that I could spend on learning. In these entries, I will share my progress, and comments on the materials that I am reworking. I hope that thanks to this will be a unique guide for those who want to start their adventure in the IT world.
Finally, a summary.
Since this is the first entry, but not the first week of the adventure, a small summary of what has happened so far would be useful. The adventure began with a VBA for Microsoft Excel course. In my work, I use the Excel tool daily and the team with which I cooperate also uses Excel. Until recently, we used Excel in a limited way. By getting to know VBA and implementing various types of automation for everyday work, we have changed a lot to the plus. I have prepared, among other things, a script that collects data from the whole month for me and prepares input for the report. It took me 13 hours to prepare the script. Saving work each month is about 16 hours.
That’s where it started. Then I set about learning Python. For many reasons, I like this programming language and at the same time, I am close to the ways of using it in data analysis. Data analysis to Machine Learning is very close and so I jumped into 5DAYCHALANGE led by Vladimir Alekseichenko. Before I took up the challenge, I thought ML was difficult and it would take a long time to be able to take care of it. It turns out that it is not so terrible. It takes a few hours to grasp the basics. Today I am already after the first data processing and the first ML model. I will write a separate post about how and what I did, as soon as I manage to train a meaningful predictive model.
The last element that I am currently dealing with is Git. Working even with the examples from the book, it turns out that you can have working code, and a few pages later the code no longer works and you have to go back and write the code again. I wondered how to deal with it. How to version files to make it easier to play a certain step in the created code. Looking for answers, I came across the Git version control system and Maciej Aniserowicz’s course. I’m currently reworking a course and learning how to use Git so I don’t have to rewrite the code to go back to the previous state.