2023 was quite the year. Like so many of us, I found myself diving headfirst into the world of ChatGPT and other large language models. I was an early adopter of prompt engineering and trying to craft valuable starting prompts that would focus the conversation into niche topics, i found it extremely useful and it was blowing my mind with the potential to be both a game-changer and a massive time-saver.

But as the year wound down, I found myself itching for more. I was tinkering with creating custom agents through various interfaces, and soon enough, the limitations of my non-coding capabilities became glaringly obvious. I needed to up my game. And so, my journey began.

On day one, I wasn't plotting 100 days of anything, the next day I had plans of going to the gym and watching a Manchester United game. Nope. I just wanted to see if I could finally crack the code on learning to program. God knows, my past attempts were short-lived, either fizzling out after a few days or barely stretching into a couple of weeks.

Rewind ten years, and my coding know-how was pretty much limited to what I learned in high school. HTML, CSS, and a dab of JavaScript—no fancy frameworks, just the bare bones, and Notepad++. Sure, my stint as a QA engineer had me dabbling in Selenium and Appium, writing basic test cases in Java with a hefty dose of hand-holding from a senior engineer. But this? This was a whole new ball game.

Day 1

Armed with a learning budget from work, I stumbled upon Zero to Mastery. With over 80 courses and a treasure trove of Python material, it was exactly what I needed. I signed up and dove into the main Python course, eager to see where this would take me.

Week 1

You might call this the honeymoon phase as the first week was a blur of late nights, stretching well past midnight as I put my two-year-old to bed at seven and hunkered down to code. I was devouring the basics at breakneck speed, the thrill of learning fueling my marathon sessions. Was it the most effective way of learning? No. But could I stop and go to bed? No.

Week 2

As the course veered into advanced territory, I had to pump the brakes. I ventured into the Open AI API, snagged an API key, and whipped up a basic command-line ChatGPT chat. My own ChatGPT in my terminal? Heck, yes! Was it very useful? not yet, but it fuelled my desire to learn even more!

Weeks 3-4

The advanced sections of the course were starting. Regex, decorators, OOP... it was a heavy mix of challenging and intriguing topics. Projects popped up left and right—a PDF manager here, a web scraper there. That web scraper? It became my morning newspaper, fetching the top 10 Hacker News articles tailored to my interests. But the real gem was my custom Python tutor, built from the initial command line GPT from the previous weeks, configured in a way that forced me to solve problems on my own, fed with targeted documentation from Python official docs and the libraries I was using. Next up? Flask, and a portfolio website project.

Weeks 5-6

The portfolio project started as a follow-the-leader exercise but quickly morphed into something uniquely mine. With my Python tutor by my side, I built, deployed, and even centered a div on my portfolio website. It was a far cry from perfection, but it was mine, and it was magnificent. Shortly after, it vanished from the internet, but the experience was unforgettable.

Week 7

Course completed, I wondered, "What's next?" The answer? Web development. I dove into a Django boot camp course, also provided by Zero to Mastery, navigating the chunkier waters of Django compared to Flask was difficult, but with my trusty tutor guiding me through it I felt I was making good progress. The link shortener project gave me a run for my money, but that's a story for another day.

There I was, 50 days in. My nights (and quite a few early mornings) have been consumed by this newfound hobby, and you know what? even if my sleep and maybe even well-being had taken a hit was loving every minute of it.