I have lost count of how many times I have started the “Scientific Computing with Python” certification by FreeCodeCamp. I started it so many times, only to give up when reaching the first project or get distracted by other Python learning materials. I bought three books to read, started YouTube videos I didn’t finish, and began the Python chapter on Kaggle, among other things.
As a result, we are approaching March, and I haven’t made any progress on my Python learning this month. So, I will start over again for the nth time—but this time, I will record my progress publicly in this article.
Learning String Manipulation by Building a Cypher
My logs
March 7th, I am starting again Scientific Computing with Python for the trillion time.
We are April 20th, and I didn’t touch FreeCodeCamp since my last update. Let’s try AGAIN. I will take back from step 30, I think it’s more or less where I stopped last month. I think I already completed 3-4 times this chapter. But since I give up for a long time this FreeCodeCamp course, I feel like I have to start over again.
So now we are on April 20th evening, I finished from step 30 to step 65. It’s 10pm. Time for a break.
April 21st. I completed from step 65 to step 75. But I wasn’t really focused and didn’t really pay attention to what my new function vigenere() was doing. It’s a common trap I have with Freecodecamp exercises, it’s easy to just follow every single step and stop paying attention to what they are doing. I would end up with a completed function without knowing how to do redo it myself, with no support.
My notes
I started back from step 30, and now it’s 10 pm, and I am at step 65. Time for a break, hopefully not a month-long break.
In this chapter, I learnt what a Caesar cypher is. Yes it’s not related to coding but cryptography, but still interesting to learn about. Here is Wikipedia’s definition:
In cryptography, a Caesar cipher, also known as Caesar’s cipher, the shift cipher, Caesar’s code, or Caesar shift, is one of the simplest and most widely known encryption techniques. It is a type of substitution cipher in which each letter in the plaintext is replaced by a letter some fixed number of positions down the alphabet. For example, with a left shift of 3, D would be replaced by A, E would become B, and so on. The method is named after Julius Caesar, who used it in his private correspondence.
In this chapter, so far, I learned about the basics: variables, functions, loops and some methods such as .find(), .index()…
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