Okay, I have to admit that I've been slacking. While I was doing a lot of work coding, I let my Python practice fall off hard. It would be easy to blame getting busy, but I think that there is another culprit to blame. After finishing building a Battleship analog in a Code Academy course, I decided I would try and make a version that used all of the right ship sizes and a larger grid.

The first wall I hit was some weird problems with the indentation of the code. Then trying to figure out how to keep and check all of the spaces that have been used by prior ships. This was where I really ran into a problem. I was banging my head against the wall, thinking that most of my predicament was using the ships row and column as single values. It would be easier to have an array of used spaces if they were stored as cartesian coordinates.

While at some point I would like to have the patience to get back to this, this summer really wasn't the best time to bash my head against a wall. I changed jobs, and need to do a crash course in SCOM to catch up after not using it for a few years. That and the final couple of weeks of my old job was a grind through night shifts. (More on that later.)

I'm not giving up on Python. As I get settled into the new job, I am probably going to stay off the Python wagon. I plan on getting back to it, but it's either that or set aside the writing. Since I'll still be coding at work, I want to make sure that my blog gets a bit of attention. Even it is only posts explaining why I'm not doing as much.

This problem does illuminate that my background in scripting is not strictly the same as coding. Trying to do more complex data types exposes things I've not really worked on since college. (A surprisingly long time ago that I would instead not actually do the math on.) I'll take the L here, but I intend on getting back to it.

I thought that it was important to talk about failure. Even if only ten or twelve of you read this thing, though probably even fewer bother with the coding diary entries, it is crucial that the slop of the graph not appear even. Looking at the progress of learning as exclusively advancement leaves out vital attempts at overreaching. Trying to get into trouble by doing more than you're able is a great way to illuminate where you need more help. Especially when doing self-directed learning, these failures can be just as valuable. It's often the only assessment you really get.