Warning. All blog. No code. I'm not sorry.
Today I worked on something completely out of the oridinary for me. I didn't dive into best practices for tesitng my Python code or how to learn where Vancouver's speakeasy espresso shops were with Python. I even went to the book store today and only stayed in the computer book section for like, less than a minute.
Super crazy.
Today I did something that actually felt really "programmerish/hackerish." I had this file of code and I knew how it worked and how to see that it was working and roughly how it was put together but I didn't know what anything in it did. So I went on and tried to break it.
I did it safely of course. I made a copy of it and made sure the copies were in the same folder as my main project folder (actually the project folder for this blog) so just in case it blew up it would ruin everything else.
I didn't even realize it was "coding" until I was freaking out that I hadn't "programmed" all day (after just finishing season 3 of Stranger Things. Sad to see the gang go but I'm glad they didn't decide to ruin it by gracing us with a disgraceful finale cliffhanger) but then I remembered I did some programmerish things.
I know what you're thinking.
"How does he know what I'm thinking in the future? I mean this post was written like what, Saturday night, call it early Sunday morning and for all he knows I could be reading this June 7th 2023"
No not that. Don't be so silly. I'm not diving into a "here's what you should do to learn code" rant again but it will partially be that because in just following the #100DaysOfCode hashtag to be a part of the community, I'm surprised at how many people have no idea how to learn something when the answer is blatently obvious.
The file that I was talking about earlier was an .html file but it's the file Jupyter Notebook craps out after you run a good ol' nbconvert on the thing. (don't be intimidated. nbconvert converts a jupyter notebook file (notebook.ipynb) to an html file (now notebook.html (ooooo so shiny)) but when you do this it builds a file that is at least 13,000 lines long, and those first 13,000 lines are CSS.
You read all of that right. It's shocking at first I know but the whole thing is self contained and packaged pretty nicely. I seriously convert my jupyter notebook files into html files and then just load them up to github and that's my website. That's. It.
I started to mess around with the CSS and the HTML and was doing a bunch of neat things and then it occured to me, I can't be the only one who's like "oooooh what's in here..." and there are a bunch of people who love messing around with the format of their Jupyter Notebook files.
What a revelation right? Do something to learn something? Go poke around in a code file to see if you can figure out what it does? Get me a violin and some tea and call me Shirly.
I always forget though, it's always the obvious things that help us learn and the best learning is happening when you're really letting your curiosity take over. I didn't sit down to "learn code" this morning when I was doing that. I actually almost didn't.
I went to set my laptop up and there was all this stuff on my desk. So I started moving stuff around and I knocked my hand on something and dropped something else and tried to pull this one thing out but it got stuck and then I needed this one thing from the room but then I came back with only my water bottle and then my water bottle needed to be filled up but inefficiently so because I needed to get the thing and then....
Sitting down to code wasn't about to happen as you can see but I finally just did a big "hrrrrrmmphh" and decided that I was going to work on my website but grabbed onto the nearest tangent instead.
I don't know. I sometimes start writing these blog posts with something in mind but I usually forget the point I'm trying to make 3/8ths of the way through.
That's
2019-08-04 03:13:46.110944