I have been poking around in this
Coding Python For Maroons book and trying to do some simple coding stuff. Just to find something to tickle that other part of my brain. I am trying not to worry that my major hobby seems to be learning cool things and then forgetting them.
I decided I wanted to try to make a program that would print out the fibonacci sequence. Should be easy, right? I tried a bunch of different ways and couldn't get it to work. Even when I just wrote out the steps in English and tried to translate them.
Weird, I remember doing this in my high school programming class no problem. So I looked up solutions online (cheating, I know) and
every solution blew my mind in some small or large way (functions can run themselves recursively? You can assign multiple variables in one line instead of sequentially? "Dictionaries?"). Computers are cool as hell.
More importantly, the concept of a "dictionary" in python made me finally understand this GIS database thing I struggled with all day Saturday for my last assignment. I usually think I am a "learn by doing" type but all the examples we did in class did not help me the way a few sentences did just now. I am going to claim the professor used an example that was not very helpful. Knowing her, the example was the way it was because of some quirky feature GIS had in 1985 that she still abides by.
Whenever I tell my roommate what I am up to, he tells me that it all sounds interesting but it sure isn't urban planning. I think I'm OK with that. I had a nice conversation at my last job interview about how a lot of the really interesting stuff is in the weird subtopics that get lumped into Urban Planning programs because they don't belong anywhere else. The interviewer agreed and said don't worry, you're going in the right direction.