It’s been a busy few weeks. The Pybites community and coding platform has
seen about 90% of my Python time over the past four weeks.
The setup is simple, there are a number (10, I think) of Intro Bites
(coding problems) to get started on, and hooked.
From there, once I signed up, I did the beginner Bites. After studying and coding for sometime I was surprised with the breath of the topics covered. It was challenging. The key to the platforms addictive nature is the in the bites themselves.
Not only is there the dopamine rush of having your code pass the pytests,
there’s also the knowledge that what you just solved is in a simplified manner,
a real world problem. There are about 370 bites as of writing this, and
I expect more to be added over time. The range from beginner to intermediate to
advanced. But don’t be fooled, even the beginner bites require a good
understanding of the topic in question.
It’s addictive. And I’ve been moving through the learning paths, starting with
the algorithms. I started there because I’d done a lot of similar code on
leetcode and while of interest, I quickly discovered that this wasn’t going to be of the most benefit to me. I switched, having done six or seven, did and completed the Collections learning path and am finishing the Data Types, in the coming week.
It’s these learning paths, focused entirely on python libraries that are
reaping rewards. I’ve a feeling now that I can get started on my
CritiqueWheel project.
That looks like it’ll be a Django project, ideally using MongoDb. My goal
however is to make the front-end and back-end completely decoupled. FastAPI
is a term I’ve seen bandied about and there’s a learning path dedicated to that
in PyBites too.
At present I’m going to go back to Educative and start and complete the
Django course there. I’m paid up, so I want to get the most out of it.
Meanwhile, I’ll finish my current learning path with PyBites, then turn to
Decorators and Context Managers before FastAPI.
We’ll see where that takes me. Watching a video the other day, one of the
recommendations was four strong projects on my GitHub might be enough to swing
an interview for a junior dev position. The CritiqueWheel might be too big
to get started, but there’s a twitter API project, I’d like to play with.
And to the title of this post, I’ve just reached the Orange Belt level in the
PyBites challenges. It’s when you have over a 100 points, and for me I’ve successfully coded 52 Bites. I’ve studied game theory and know its basic ins and outs, but it’s damn effective in keeping my
brain at it in the wee hours of the night.
The journey continues.