Daily-Programming on Janusworx

Programming, Day 60, Final post. Goals! September 2018, Start

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 08 Sep 2018 12:03:02 +0530

Getting back to life slowly.
Abandoning the idea of the daily posts.
Too amorphous for me.

Doing short 20 hour projects seems to work better for me.

To that end, here are my goals for September

20h of emacs - goal - get familiar
20h of Dvorak - goal - get upto 35wpm
walk daily - goal - 10000 steps or 90m daily

More as I figure this out.

Daily programming is dead! Long live working towards daily goals!

Programming, Day 59

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 25 Aug 2018 15:20:10 +0530

Getting better at Dvorak.
Not as fast as I like, but I’m getting there.

#

Programming, Day 58

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 22 Aug 2018 17:57:31 +0530

Doubt I’ll ever increase my typing speed by 50% ever again! 😂

Programming, Day 57

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 21 Aug 2018 17:59:56 +0530

Back to work.
Starting slow. Still sick.

So all I’m doing is switching to Dvorak and continuing daily progress.
BEHOLD! My awesomness at Dvorak! 😂

Programming, Day 56

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 15 Aug 2018 08:32:31 +0530

Nothing’ll happen this week pretty much.
Dealing with some personal health issues.

Programming, Day 55

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 12 Aug 2018 12:18:49 +0530

Updates:

Much better at gtypist lesson Q1
Also automated resizing and compressing my gtypist screenshots via an Automator folder action
Done with Chapter 9 of the Lutz Book. I now know of tuples and strings

Programming, Day 54

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 11 Aug 2018 11:04:48 +0530

Nothing to do today.
Lazy weekend!

Updates:

Daily use of Vim continues. Combining it (for the daily posts at least) with touch typing. Everything is terribly slow! It can only get better from here out :)
Completed all of lesson Q1 in gtypist today again. Went faster this time. Confident enough to start Q2, Monday onwards.
Learnt how to configure basic authentication on an Nginx site. Feel like I can manage my own stuff now. With this I think, I’ve done my 20 hours of Nginx too :)

Programming, Day 53

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 10 Aug 2018 13:36:37 +0530

Updates:

Done with the whole first lesson in Gtypist today!
All 8 levels! Yippee!
Finished another baby app, that tells you how many days to your birthday.
Finished up, chapter 8 of the Lutz book. Dictionaries make so much more sense now.

Programming, Day 52

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 09 Aug 2018 08:53:28 +0530

Updates:

15 mins each, of Gtypist & Vim done

Programming, Day 51

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 08 Aug 2018 08:53:04 +0530

Upgraded to Nikola v8, b3 today.
And now, I realise the amount of stress, virtual environments like conda and pip, alleviate.
All I had to do was backup my blog, create a new nikola environment and run it against the blog folder.
And while everything went well, I rested easy knowing that I could get everything back to the way it was :)

Updates:

Last Vim update. Am fairly ok with using it as my daily text editor now. And the anki deck is almost committed to memory. Think my twenty hours are done today :)
Done with 15 mins of gtypist. Getting slowly better.
Done with watching 5 chapters of the Jumpstart course. Will practice them tomorrow.

Programming, Day 50

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 07 Aug 2018 09:33:05 +0530

It’s taken me 50 days to somehow figure out a way to study.
I still feel like Sisyphus.
But I realise now, that I have the map. The land isn’t large and unknown as I feared earlier.
I just need to keep my head down and take it step by step.

Updates:

09.45 – gtypist improves slowly by the day. Getting better, yet stretching
14.15 – vim moves ahead well!

Programming, Day 49

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 06 Aug 2018 15:20:29 +0530

Back to office, still feel funny, so taking it easy.

Updates:

15.00 – Done with all the new cards in the Vim Anki Deck. A few more days and I think I’ll drop Vim from the updates. While I’ll never be as fast or productive as other Vim speed demons, that’s not what I’m aiming for anyhoo. I just want to be as fast and error free as I was with DOS edit in the late 90s :P
15:30 – Slower but more accurate with gtypist today.
Got half of Chapter 7 in the Lutz book done
Watched the video for App 3 in the Jumpstart Python course

Programming, Day 48

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 05 Aug 2018 14:57:26 +0530

One way you realise you are making progress is when you realise you’re using the skills you learn elsewhere too.
Finished my duolingo session today with my raw “asdf” touch typing skills. I’m slowly internalising touch typing.
Stil quite aways to go, though :)

Updates:

13.00, Did Vim Anki and used touch typing there too
14.45, 15 mins of gtypist. Loving it now, despite the pain it causes :)
15.00, Beginning Lutz Chapter 4, NUmbers in Action
1. Overloading and Polymorphism, Python itself overloads some opertaors such that they perform different actions depending on the type of buily-in objects being processed.
  For example, the + operator performs addition when applied to numbers but concatenation when applied to sequence objects like strings and lists.
  This property is usually called polymorphism
22.00, Chapter 6 of the Lutz book done. It’s a small one called A Dynamic Interlude, but it cleared so many huhs for me.

Programming, Day 47

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 04 Aug 2018 18:52:51 +0530

Late start to the day today.
Was busy moving a table from mum’s place to mine.
This should help my back a lot!

Updates:

7p, Getting better with gtypist.
8.15p, Done with Vim
8.20p, No Python Apps tonight
22.33, Just understood the difference between generic sequence operations and methods (my aha for the day!)
You can run generic sequence operation across the core object types. For e.g. I can run the len function on strings, or numbers or lists.
Methods, are object specific. I can only run numeric methods on numbers and string methods on strings.
This probably is why you run generic operations in front of a type, like type(s) and methods as a .whatever like s.isupper.
Lutz shows me another quick rule of thumb; when you run the dir function on an object it should list the generic operations with underscores e.g. __len__ and methods just show up as plain attributes later in the listing e.g. swapcase
11.57p, Done with Chapter 4 of the Lutz book.
- Final big insight for future reference.
  Polymorphism means that the meaning of an operation (like a +) depends on the objects being operated upon. This turns out to be a key idea (perhaps the key idea) behind using Python well—not censtraining code to specific types makes that code automatically applicable to many types.

Programming, Day 46

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 03 Aug 2018 12:34:09 +0530

Am really enjoying practicing Vim and Python syntax with my Anki decks.
Will start doing 10 mins of touch typing daily.
My young friends in the DGPLUG irc channel, all seem to have gained wings with their typing speeds.

Given up on the #100daysofcode for now.
Current strategy is to …

Read theory (Lutz)
Practice programs
Ask friends to give me more programs.

Updates

2p, Restarting the Lutz book. Got lost.
2.15p, Just realised why I love Vim. Vim makes me want to write.
3.20p, Also realised I’d bought myself a beginner Talk Python to Me, course a while back. I could use this for point 2 above.
6.30p, Two baby apps done.
10.45p, Did chapters 1 & 2 of the Lutz Book.
11p, Did 10 minutes of Gtypist. As you can see below, there’s a lo–oong way to go :P

Learning Aha

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 02 Aug 2018 21:36:08 +0530

I’ve been moaning and bitching the past couple of years about how smart I was in my teens and how I could learn any darn thing I set my mind to, then.

My school grades did not reflect it though.

And these days, my consulting solutions have been top notch, and yet, I struggle to sharpen the saw.

What gives?

It struck me today, as I finished watching some Python videos along my struggling Python journey, that I was understanding the concepts much better than I had in the past few months.

And then it hit me, like a ton of bricks!

There are two aspects to learning effectively (for me) …

I need to vary my reading and use a lot of sources.
I need to practice lots to gain fluency.

Lack of practice in my cocky youth led to me knowing much, but since I had no fluency, my grades suffered.
And since I’m not making an effort to gain various points of view now, I struggle to make syntopical connections and my learning suffers.

So in essence, if I make a concerted effort (in a structured, disciplined way) to read more, cast my net a little wider and practice a lot, I should be able to whoop 18 year old Jason’s ass!

Wish me luck!

Programming, Day 45

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 02 Aug 2018 16:50:37 +0530

Linode mailed me complaining that average CPU usage was 90% over the past couple of hours!
Culprit turned out to be the headless dropbox client I’d installed the day before.

Lessson learnt.
Switched to periodic rysnc via a cron job.

Nothing else done today.
Still sick as a dog.

Watched a couple of Python tutorials

Programming, Day 44

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 01 Aug 2018 10:09:52 +0530

Learnt a new trick to drive home my Vim skills.
I use the Anki Deck, and before I answer, I actually try the question out on a document to see if I got it right.
Seems to be building muscle memory much faster than I could by just practicing or by just memorising. I love the immediate feedback loop!
Should try this out with my math rote exercises too.

Charted out a plan for the Lutz book. 2 Chapters or a 100 pages a day, whichever is less.
This should let me finish the book in 20 days. Trying to figure out a way to structurally practice tiny problems too.
That #100daysofcode research is still pending.
Will hopefully do it tomorrow.
Have a full day at work today.

Programming, Day 43

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 31 Jul 2018 08:25:51 +0530

Guess I’ll call it a day, learning Vim.
Done about 16 hours¹ of Vim reading and practice.
The rest of the 4 hours will come from daily Vim use now.
Have begun to use it for darn near everything.

Can move about with slight ease and copy & paste with lots of unease.
Practice makes perfect, I suppose.

Plan for the day, since I’m home sick?
Well I’m a gonna swing for the fences and finish the Lutz book.

Will update at night.

P.S. Bonus todo
Got to see if I can do a #100daysofcode run with Python.
If I can, I ought to start.

Update (10.30) – Ok, huge overstimation. Lutz will take time.
Looking at doing Lutz chapters as my #100daysofcode challenge.
Update (11.00) - I like this. talking to myself.
Wonder if I should move Nikola and run it from the server itself, so I can ssh and use it from anywhere?
Update (18.00) - Well, the day was a bust. Slept all day. Did nothing :)

Committing to learning something just for 20 hours to get good enough is easily the best thing I’ve learnt this year! ↩︎

Programming, Day 42

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 28 Jul 2018 09:31:48 +0530

Plan:

Start doing 20 hours of VIM.
Finish another Lutz chapter.

Will update progress by days’ end.

Updates:
2pm. Got myself a VIM Anki deck.

10pm.

Sadly no Lutz today.
Practiced Vim all day.
Finished Painless Vim.
Changed my theme.
Recomposed this post in Vim
Changed my terminal editor from code to vim, so that all new posts will now be “Vim Powered!”

Programming, Day 41

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 18:16:52 +0530

Slow day. Didn’t do anything.
Only finished one chapter from Lutz.

Programming, Day 40

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 26 Jul 2018 08:18:02 +0530

It’s been 40 days and somehow I don’t feel like I’ve come all that far.
Yet, I know the only way I can make progress is by taking small steps.
Two more chapters done from the Lutz book. Boy, is he thorough!
Will be reading about String Fundamentals today.

Also, ran across this inspirational post yesterday.
This along with Kushal’s (always generous) advice¹ that I should start tinkering with stuff, makes me wonder if I should also do the #100DaysOfCode challenge, with Python.
After all, it seems to have done the trick for my writing.
I no longer have writers block :)

Will see if it is doable.
À bientôt!

One of the most altruistic souls I know after my father & VK. ↩︎

Programming, Day 39

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 25 Jul 2018 12:46:55 +0530

![Me holding Mark Lutz’s monstrous Learning Python Book](/images/2018/IMG_1040.jpg) Alright, speed reading Lutz is a little bit of an over statement :P But four chapters done and working towards finishing it. Love the comprehensive treatment of Python. Would love to see an update to the book, since Mark’s such a wonderful teacher, but that [doesn’t seem likely][1]. Mark does religiously update [here though][2]. This will always serve as an excellent foundational resource. Would have loved to learn from Mark in person. The book is a close second!

Programming, Day 38

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 24 Jul 2018 14:29:59 +0530

Speed read the PYM book. Kushal covers a vast subject in a really compressed, yet concise way.
Next up to speed read, Lutz’s Learning Python.
Started using Vim as my primary editor. Trying to get fluent.

Programming, Day 34, 35, 36, & 37

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 23 Jul 2018 09:44:23 +0530

Two days off, two days watching Python videos

Programming, Day 32 & 33

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 14:18:01 +0530

Watched Python videos

Programming, Day 31

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 17 Jul 2018 20:53:40 +0530

Got back on the Python horse.
Using the PYM book to learn along, in the DGPLUG Summer Training.
Installed MU.
Hanging on for dear life and trying to follow along.

Programming, Day 30, Ansible

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 16 Jul 2018 21:23:44 +0530

I finally got tired of rebuilding my servers from scratch everytime.
It hadn’t troubled me enough to do something about it, until recently.
I got myself a pc to do linux development on and I keep nuking the os and reinstalling.

Rebuilding it over and over was exciting in the beginning and then it sudddenly began to grate on my nerves.

So I decided to put in my twenty hours after my break and learn Ansible.

What it is at its heart, is a recording & playback engine for setting up computers. You record the steps you usually do, in a text file, using a language called YAML on your mac or pc or what have you. And then you playback those actions on your server or target pc. Ansible gives you primitives, the basic building blocks, called modules to do just about anything you wish.

In my case,

I setup a barebones server running Bionic Beaver and configured it for ssh access
Everything from then on, was controlled by the YAML playbook I was building step by step
I updated the machine
I configured three users
I setup UFW & Fail2Ban
NGINX was next
I configured my 4 little play subdomains
And finally configured Letsencrypt and enabled SSL

And that’s about all I wanted from my basic machine so far.
Running the script start to finish takes about 30 mins and I have a machine ready to go!
Doing all that by hand is fraught with errors and takes me nearly half a day.

Every other task I need done now, I’ll start doing via Ansible.

There’s obviously lots more to learn. The playbook (my recording) started from nothing and has now grown to an unwieldy 200 odd lines.
I can hive them off into other files and call them seperately.
I can optimize what I’ve written, and make it portable, so that I can setup any server I wish, not just mine.

But all that is for later.

I did this, so I could have a machine to trash and rebuild quickly.
Now that I have one, Python, here I come.

P.S.
It also gave me a small sense of how coding actually works.
It was slow steady progress.
Building a bit, testing, iterating, tinkering and playing.
And at the end of the day, I have something that I can call my own, something I built and something that makes my work easier.
By Jove, this is going to be fun!

Programming, Day 29

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 14 Jul 2018 14:50:20 +0530

As you know, I’m struggling to learn programming. The break has done some good.

I realised I’m overthinking this and I should just put my head down and do a little everyday.
I realised the the basic concepts aren’t that many and I just need to get fluent with them.
I just assumed that it was all so vast that I couldn’t wrapt my head around it.

Maybe it is, but everything has a seed.
And the seed it small.
Andf it contains everything the mighty oak, would ever need to grow.

Back in the saddle. Learning Ansible so that I do not have to keep doing things over and over on my box.

PyCon India 2016 (Farhaan Bukhsh)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 11 Jul 2018 16:14:16 +0530

A big thank you to Farhaan Bukhsh, who’s been kind and generous enough to let me steal his work and his words

Day 0

“This is awesome! This is so awesome!”, these were was my reactions as I boarded my first flight to Delhi.

I was having trouble finding proper accommodation.
Kushal, Sayan and Chandan helped me a lot there.
I finally got the honour of bunking with Sayan, Subho and Rtnpro. This made for an unforgettable experience!
I landed and directly went to JNU convention center. I met the whole Red Hat intern gang. It was so much fun meeting them all.
I had proposed Pagure for the Dev Sprints and I roped in Vivek as collaborator and partner in crime.

Imagine my metal agony and tension when the sprint started and there was no sign of Vivek or Saptak. Saptak is a FOSSASIA contributor and Vivek contributes to Pagure with me.
Finally it was my turn to talk about Pagure on stage. It was all the things I feared. It was nerve wrackingly terrifying.
And yet … it was beautiful!
The experience and the energy gave me a new high and made me confident.
We got a lot of young and new contributors, and we tried to guide them and make them send at least one PR. One of them persisted and made actually made a PR which got readily merged.

I met lots of other contributors and mentors!
Everything sounded fun! Each and every project was simply amazing.
I wished I could contribute to and help all of them.
We also met Paul, who writes code for PyCharm, and had an animated discussion over Vim v/s PyCharm.

Finally the day ended with us, (Vivek, Sayan, Subho, Saptak and me) going out to dinner. I bunked with Sayan and Subho and we hacked all night long. I was configuring my Weechat and was trying all the plugins available and trust me there are a lot of them.

Day 1

I was a session chair in one of the lecture rooms and it was crazy!
From learning to write firmware for a drone, to using generators to write multi-threaded programs to working with the salt stack, it was a rich varied, mind bending experience

The food was really good but the line for food was “pythonic!”

There were a lot of stalls put up and I went to all of them chatted with the folks manning the stalls. My favorite one was PyCharm because Paul promised me to teach me some neat tricks.
The Pyladies booth was very informative and were responsible for making attendees aware about certain social issues and about getting women in tech.

We had two keynotes by Baishampayan Ghose and Van Lindberg. Both of the keynotes were so varied, yet so amazing, they made me look at technology from a different view point altogether.

One really cool part of such a conference is the Open Spaces and Lightning talks. I attended a few and I found them enthralling. I was so eagerly waiting for DGPLUG’s famous staircase meeting. I met Kushal’s mentor, Sartaj and he gave us deep insights into the whats and whys and wherefores of the importance of contributing to open source. My big takeaway from his time with us, was that even if one’s code is not used by anyone, they should still be writing code for the love of it.

After this we went out for DGPLUG/Volunteers dinner at BBQ Nation. It was quite an eventful evening ;)

Day 2

The last day of conference, I remember having thoughts about how a programming language translates into philosophy and how that philosophy unites a diverse nation like India.
While that feeling of inclusivity was amazing, there was also a touch of sadness, the melancholy of parting from friends who meet just once a year.
I could actually now relate all IRC nicks with their faces. It brings a lot more to the table. It made them all relatable, more … human.

And at last we all returned to the humdrum of our normal lives with a promise to meet again. I still wonder at how technology creates camaraderie between people from all nooks and corners of life. At how it relates a school teacher to a product engineer. It makes me feel that Python is more than just a programming language; it’s a unique medium that unites people and gives them power to make things right.

With this joyful thought fhackdroid signs out!

Happy Hacking!

End of Day Review

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 08 Jul 2018 20:35:33 +0530

This is a rewrite of a young budding blogger friend’s post.
Mainly to give him something to reach for.
Also, testing live previews in Nikola.
#

It’s witching hour as I write this.
I’m done with my day and I thought, for once, let me just jot down and reflect on my day.

It’s very common amongst us students to spend our whole day working on this and that and feel like we’re doing really well and are very busy and then somehow find that the whole day was fruitless and yielded nothing.
I’m obviously no exception.

Which is why … this post.
I hope that if I write about what I’m doing (and continue to write daily), I might have a measure of progress, of success.

Here’s my day (not counting my workout hours)

SQL: I am having a really nice experience with “SQL in 14 days.”
I am understanding lots as I go through the chapters.Even better, I maintained a 12 day streak; today was the 13th day. I learned about embedded sql, and to implement that, I learned about Transact SQL.

This was pretty good but i am not quite satisfied by this and the only reason I can come up with for that i can think of is, I didn’t implement my work in a project.

Linux: A good day for my linux learning. I’ve almost completed the “Linux for You and Me” guide by Kushal Das. Only about a chapter and a half remains. I’ll probably be done be done by day’s end tomorrow.
I learned many commands and concepts about Linux, like the “ps aux” command, the “jobs” command, and “top”, processes, systemd, init, and so much more. I’ve learned how to check for running processes in the system, that the initial process in the system has pid 1; these and many more interesting things helped me go deeper and learn more about my own system.

I always implement commands which show up in the guide, so this part leaves me pretty thrilled.

Machine Learning: I started about six weeks ago. I am pursuing Andrew Ng’s course on the Coursera platform. I find this technology very interesting. I am now on my sixth week and my mentor tells me, we’ve completed the basics of Machine learning in the week four, which means we are now moving forward to talk about the real world implementation of machine learning.
Also yay! I learned about spam classifiers today. It was a nice topic to learn and implement.

I want to do a minor project on machine learning now, which will help me understand things practically. Until then “I am not going to be satisfied”.

dgplug: Today we had a review session in the training and it was nice to see people being so involved in the sessions. It shows me that people are now getting the hang of things and learning what they are taught and the guides they are referenced. The questions they asked were really good, but one thing I noted to myself, was that I didn’t asked a single question. Perhaps I had no queries or i don’t know what I don’t know, but I think, attending the session is also atleast as valuable as asking questions, as I read all the queries and their solutions in the logs and I learn lots much from that.

Also, I am waiting eagerly for Sayan’s next session on Git. The first one was amazing!

Documentary: Like we were told to, I watched the documentary , “The Internet’s Own Boy.” It was a touching, and moving documentary about Aaron Swartz, showcasing his brilliance and enthusiasm for the Internet and its opennness and how he fought against the illegal things the government was doing. It also showed about the methods government used to hide their Black Ops and how they annoy and and threaten and even remove someone who comes in their way of doing what they want.

Random Things: My system hung for quite sometime, so i “furiously” pressed so many keys with the Fn key(I am glad, I didn’t kicked it in with my foot as my type of nerd footballers do!). When the system still didn’t work, i mashed the power button (I didn’t want to do that, as it reset my uptime which had barely reached 5 days, but sadly, I was left with no other option). When i restarted the system, it was fine but the WiFi was didn’t start. I searched for solutions on google and I learned more commands, which were “rfkill list”, “rfkill unblock all”, “rfkill unblock ”. These were to switch off the soft-block and hard-block processes in the system.
I think sometimes even a hung system can teach you so many things :). By the way, my problem was not solved by these commands, since actually when i kicked all those keys with the Fn key, I also smashed the F2 key which is the manual WiFi switch on board.

Things on My Mind: I want to contribute to the website of a newly started community which i am a member of, but i have no idea of how things work and how to do that. This is a really serious issue for me and i need to resolve it as fast as i can.

And in meantime, I also watched an old episode of Agents of SHIELD.

I think I’ve written my heart out.
Seems like it would be good to stop here.

Thank you, and have a nice day!

P.S.
On reflection, I realise that I am happiest when I am implementing things out in the real world, with real work, in real projects.
I need to think long and hard about ways in which I can do that.

Programming, Day 28

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 02 Jul 2018 11:32:27 +0530

Crashed and burned a bit.
So on a weeks break.
Be back.

Python on the backburner for now. Ansible first.

Programming, Day 27

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 30 Jun 2018 08:44:58 +0530

Busy day.
Couldn’t do much.

Had a ton of fun, talking writing and blogging, over at DGPLUG though :)

P.S.
Also figured out what a reverse proxy is, how to terminate an ssl connection at NGINX for the proxy and how to add a subdomain to a Let’s Encrypt certificate.

Programming, Day 25 & 26

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 29 Jun 2018 09:19:44 +0530

Setup a couple of personal nginx sites for practice. Will see if I can do something more with them soon.

Programming, Day 24

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 26 Jun 2018 21:31:24 +0530

Alright, Regex done.
Python, here I come!

Programming, Day 23

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 25 Jun 2018 18:49:10 +0530

Done learning Regex. Practice for a few hours tomorrow to be good enough.

Programming, Day 21 & 22

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 24 Jun 2018 14:46:41 +0530

–>

Figured out NGINX syntax.
While no means an expert now, I can at least make sense of what’s written and slowly write my own blocks.

Which leads me to a bit of yak shaving.

If I need any flexibility, NGINX defaults to using regular expressions.

So, that’s the next step for a few days.

Aaron Swartz’s Pinboard Profile

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 22 Jun 2018 10:05:59 +0530

One of the assignments in the DGPLUG summer training is to watch “The Internet’s Own Boy”.

I keep telling the youth in the channel, I lived through Aaron Swartz’s life and followed him throughout.
And then I began to wonder how I did it.
I’ve never followed him personally; not his blog, or any mailing list.
Early on, I only knew him, through Google and Dave Winer & John Gruber’s posts.
And then it struck me today.

Aaron’s Pinboard profile!

Going all the way back to late 2004 (I don’t know when he imported it all), it’s a goldmine of information into how Aaron’s mind ticked. What he liked, the political discourse that influenced him, movies and books that appealed to him, people that he followed.

It’s all there.

I think I actually stumbled on to Maciej via Aaron and then followed him too, as he started Pinboard and went on his way to build his Bookmark Empire.
And in the early halcyon days of whom to follow, whom to read, I binge read Aaron’s profile in 2009-10 and then kept binging again on and off through the years.

And that’s how I know Aaron.
Go read. It’s a wonderful complement to the video.

Programming, Day 20

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 22 Jun 2018 07:14:51 +0530

Redid the linux pc.
Just because.

Programming, Day 19

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 21 Jun 2018 06:50:17 +0530

Sick yesterday. So read lots of NGINX articles on the web.

Feel like I need to be conversant with its directives, considering all the web server slinging I’ve been doing

Programming, Day 18

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 20 Jun 2018 13:38:18 +0530

Moved the home PC to Bionic Beaver.
Set it up so I can ssh into it from outside.

I’m so happy, I now have a powerful machine to actually process work on, instead of my dinky little iPad.

Programming, Day 17

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 19 Jun 2018 12:14:10 +0530

Brushing up old Python for an hour

Programming, Day 16

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 18 Jun 2018 08:16:36 +0530

Didn’t do much.
Helped Kushal moderate the first day of the DGPLUG summer training, though.

Programming, Day 14 — Lauren Ipsum

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 16 Jun 2018 00:00:33 +0530

Since I’ve been having so much trouble grasping the basic fundamentals of coding, I decided to learn from “children’s” books.

Lauren Ipsum has been lying in my library for a while now. Here’s the summary from the introductory pages,

Lauren, a clever girl lost in Userland, applies logic and problem solving skills to find her way home, encountering along the way such concepts as timing attacks, algorithm design, and the traveling salesman problem.

And that somehow gave me the map to this huge unknown land of coding, programming, computer science, what have you.

Breaking everything down to first principles in delightfully simple language, it’s wonderful.
Almost like a Zen koan, with levels.
Learning aside, the story’s so engaging that on my first run, I just read through to know whether Lauren finds her way home (spoiler: she does :P)

As you read through a couple of times, you get the principles and then you get several ahas when you see them in the real world.
The last chapter explains all the references and characters in the book. I got only about half of them.

My main takeaway from the book was to “Make your own map.” Computers only make sense when they do what you need done. Also use the five whys to really know what you want, so that you can then figure out a solution that might not be what everyone does or uses, but something that uniquely solves your problems :)

Case in point, i was looking for a Visual Studio Code extension that helped me create reference style links with Markdown. And for the life of me I could not find one.

And then I did the five whys.
And realised that all I needed was something that took my selected text and wrapped them in square brackets. That was my pain point and that was all I needed solved. Realising that, made me look for something accordingly and it led me to Embrace.
Et voila! No more pain :)

Lauren Ipsum is awesomely funny … or funnily awesome …
Either way it’s a must read :)

Programming, Day 13

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 15 Jun 2018 00:00:01 +0530

I thought Nikola could not schedule my drafts for me, until I realised it actually intuitively did.
(I just had to put in a publish date in the future)

This was the only feature I miss from Ghost. I like to write in batches and queue them up.

This obviously is a letter to future me. (from past me)

If all works well, I’ll be a happy camper.

also I love how nikola new_post -f markdown --tags="daily-programming" -t "Programming, Day " -e lets me just type the title, launches my editor and has everything ready. It always makes me giggle with glee :)

Programming, Day 12

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 14 Jun 2018 11:20:51 +0530

Experimental micro blog post. There. The day’s work is done.

Programming, Day 11

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 13 Jun 2018 12:15:25 +0530

Imported the rest of the posts I wanted into the blog. Hopefully all done now.

Will write and focus on programming and writing now.

Will figure a few modifications to the theme, once I grow more bolder

Programming, Day 10

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 12 Jun 2018 11:44:42 +0530

Setting up a virtual machine for nikola imports today.

Programming, Day 9

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 11 Jun 2018 13:50:09 +0530

Busy Day. Nothing done.

Programming, Day 8

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 10 Jun 2018 14:46:29 +0530

Holiday!

Daily-Programming on Janusworx

Programming, Day 60, Final post. Goals! September 2018, Start

Programming, Day 59

Getting better at Dvorak. Not as fast as I like, but I’m getting there. #

Programming, Day 58

Programming, Day 57

Programming, Day 56

Programming, Day 55

Programming, Day 54

Programming, Day 53

Programming, Day 52

Programming, Day 51

Programming, Day 50

Programming, Day 49

Programming, Day 48

Programming, Day 47

Programming, Day 46

Learning Aha

Programming, Day 45

Programming, Day 44

Programming, Day 43

Programming, Day 42

Programming, Day 41

Programming, Day 40

Programming, Day 39

Programming, Day 38

Programming, Day 34, 35, 36, & 37

Programming, Day 32 & 33

Programming, Day 31

Programming, Day 30, Ansible

Programming, Day 29

PyCon India 2016 (Farhaan Bukhsh)

End of Day Review

This is a rewrite of a young budding blogger friend’s post. Mainly to give him something to reach for. Also, testing live previews in Nikola. #

Programming, Day 28

Programming, Day 27

Programming, Day 25 & 26

Programming, Day 24

Programming, Day 23

Programming, Day 21 & 22

Aaron Swartz’s Pinboard Profile

Programming, Day 20

Programming, Day 19

Programming, Day 18

Programming, Day 17

Programming, Day 16

Programming, Day 14 — Lauren Ipsum

Programming, Day 13

Programming, Day 12

Programming, Day 11

Programming, Day 10

Programming, Day 9

Programming, Day 8

Getting better at Dvorak.
Not as fast as I like, but I’m getting there.

#

This is a rewrite of a young budding blogger friend’s post.
Mainly to give him something to reach for.
Also, testing live previews in Nikola.
#