For this post, I reviewed the Programming Historian site and its various lessons. I was immediately overwhelmed by the massive catalog of lessons and the wide variety of coding systems they were discussing. I decided to start with the easy difficulty lessons, which included topics such as “Building a Static Website,” “Python Introduction and Installation,” and “Installing Python Modules with pip.”
After a lot of trial and error with other lessons – almost signing up for Premium GitHub, getting the wrong text editor for Python that made my Mac crash, and so on – I decided to just go with the module focusing on installing Python modules with pip. This was a failure, unfortunately, as the pip application could not download onto my Mac properly, and the guide on the pip website did not give me proper ways to fix it, so I had to delete the application instead.
Overall, I was definitely starting to think I was not cut out for coding and software. It made me more sure of my decision to be a Creative Writing major, but made me ashamed to think of myself as a Digital Studies minor. However, I am not going to give up. I am going to work on my comprehension of coding, as I think that was a huge part of why so many of these downloads went wrong. I’m confident that it didn’t do any damage to the Mac, as I ran some tests with some of the other apps on the laptop, and nothing strange occurred. I want to use more coding for the projects for this class, so I will take some time to really practice with everything.
Have you already used the mapping and timeline tools? They are a good place to start….