In [14]:
!date

Sun Sep  1 22:50:32 CDT 2019


Alright, I haven't been doing this since I started back up but

# welcome to the second day 4¶

of my 100 days of code experience.

Today I'm on vacation in Waco Texas. It's a neat old town with a new looking college and a bunch of shiplap.

All I've really done today for coding is some stuff on Dataquest (which it sounds like I'm downplaying but now as I write this parenthetical I realize how important it is that I get back to Dataquest in a while) and I'm learning how to do boolean things. Like seeing if a certain value passes a test or not in a vector. I'll show for reference but I want to keep the code to a minimal because I have something else really important that I want to talk about today.

In [1]:
import numpy as np

one_to_ten_array = np.array([1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10])
print(one_to_ten_array > 9)

[False False False False False False False False False  True]


What just happened there you ask? The array/vector/thing that looks like a list of numbers from 1 to 10 is evaluated by that "is greater than 9" statement on each item of the array separately. Why is this neat? We can find outliers pretty easily this way or just specific kinds of data within a searchable range.

Let's say that list is over hundreds of items long but we want to see how many items are over ten. Even then looking at a true or false list wouldn't be helpful even though producing it was a good idea in the first place. Then you could do something like this.

In [11]:
over_nine_array = one_to_ten_array > 9
len(one_to_ten_array[over_nine_array])

Out[11]:
1

holy moly what just happened? I assigned the True or False values to an array called over_nine_array and then I used that array (the very same one you can see above) to map the values I want to index using the same one_to_ten_array. Breaking that down looks like this:

In [13]:
print(one_to_ten_array[over_nine_array])

[10]


It takes the one value that passes the condition from above. Then you can see I ran len() which is a python function to find the length of an object. It's a quick way to find the amount of items from an array that don't find a True/False condition.

However this is what I actually wanted to talk about tonight. I think it's hard to keep to this 100 days of code because I have no real goal. And I feel like when it's done I haven't made it any farther than I was 100 days ago, I just started a bunch of projects. I mean, I have definitely learned stuff but the last time I did this was to accelerate my learning by a smidge and hopefully "get a job in tech."

Doing it definitely helped me get a job but not in coding. I don't think that would be a good goal this time around because getting a job in coding and actually coding are two completely different things as I have learned and my goal of getting a job by coding for 100 days in a row isn't really applicable to the challenge as it were.

I don't really have an idea about what my goal should be but I have an overarching idea of what my main goals should be.

I have some books I've been sitting on forever and I think as coders we all have these books. We think that these books are going to be the holy grail of our learning and that once we finally make it through it we'll be the anti-hero in the movie Social Network crossed with Mr. Robot, Mindhunters, and Mortal Engines (look. Mortal Engines could have been really good, like how do you get the director of the LOTR movies to mess up so easily on concept that could have been so beautiful as cities as tanks? How do you mess that up?)

Two books that I want to finish that I own are Data Visualizations with JavaScript and Natural Language Toolkit with Python. At least that's what I think they're called and if not that's super close.

Also I want to tank through my Dataquest subscription. I'm learning a lot over there and actually I learn so much that sometimes I literally stop because I feel like I'm learning too much but not practicing enough. Like tonight, I just stopped because it seemed like I was already moving on from the concept I presented above before I really drilled it into my mindrock.

So let's make it a little more official.

1) Work regularly on DVwJS and NLTKwP books
2) Work on Dataquest more regularly as well.



Those are terribly written goals. I should make the goal to finish the books in all honesty...ugh. I have so many other things that I want to do too.

Those three things seem like a good combo though. I really want to work through this Impractical Python book as well. It's not as much as a priority but I think it could be really useful. With all of that plus my website I feel like that's kind of a full course load. Think of it, basically one programming textbook a class right?

I have so many other resources I haven't touched and that I want to add to my day. Plus my website on top of it. It's crazy dude. Super crazy. I want to do all of it in a day. So maybe that's the first goal. Figure out what a legitimate 1/100th of my challenge looks like and try to make every day like that.

equal parts: DVwJS, NLTKwP, ImpPy, coding challenges, Dataquest.

I also want to be making my own things as well. This is tough.