Welcome to radlad's Blog


Here I will detail my self-study programmer's journey including thoughts on books, courses, self-directed projects, languages, frustrations, joys and everything in-between. As my computer science background is non-traditional, my aim is to demonstrate my potential to secure a position as a programmer.

The navbar links to a sampling GitHub repo (there are more projects I still need to write about and upload), a Python-based Word Counter (10k character limit), a Django-based random book reading app called Virtual Book Browser, my computer science reading list and, of course my contact e-mail.


Udemy Courses

Completed:

In Progress:



Latest Posts

If Songs Could Make People Code Things

 Jun 26 2020

My first Django course featured a word counter app. I took an idea I had to aggregate all of Frank Sinatra's songs and count how …

Order through Concatenation

 Apr 25 2020

I had an idea for another "spring cleaning" project that involved concatenating many text files that grew too numerous and unmanageable. I wanted a unified …

VBA Player Piano: Coda

 Apr 20 2020

By now I felt comfortable working with VBA as an extension of day-to-day excel. The next month-end macro had more moving parts, but the overarching …

VBA Player Piano: Pt III

 Jan 15 2020

After 2019 Tax Season I had created an elaborate macro for general accounting's monthly revenue uploads that worked with multiple tabs containing thousands of rows …

VBA Player Piano: Pt II

 Dec 3 2019

Our staff accountants have to account for specific types of revenue every month. This involves 9 separate tabs, each pulling data from different sources (other …

VBA Player Piano: Pt I

 Nov 26 2019

My exposure to Excel VBA started with the record-point-click-stop method. My work in accounting had me manipulating lots of text-generated reports. Different reports had different …

Lost in Hex Translation: Scraping ЮТФ-8

 Aug 21 2019

Like my previous Russian scraping project, I found a site that offered dual language books for studying and enjoyment. I spent a lunch break browsing …

Web scraping my way to the Kremlin

 Aug 13 2019

I like the idea of getting into programming "because of something". I have a real problem that I want solved and I can use programming …

Boomerang: Accounting => Programming <= Marketing

 Jul 19 2019

I assisted my colleague at work with a web scraping project he wanted to demo for the marketing department. They were manually checking a website's …

Spring Cleaning With CMD and Excel

 May 13 2019

While abstractly I understood programming is a powerful tool to work with the world, it still sometimes felt magical and just beyond the optimal level …

What a Tangled Web We Weave When First We Learn How To Code

 Mar 14 2019

I needed a break from all the complexity, ominous "YOU MUST's" and advanced probability that I was getting lost in with the more advanced data …

The Science of Data: Cleaning Out Noise

 Jan 21 2019

When I first began the data science tutorials on Udemy, I felt excited to be getting into this "cutting edge" technology of the future. After …

pip intro Python: Hold the Spam

 Jan 15 2019

I decided on Python for my first deep-dive language because: 1) It's simple to read 2) has extensive libraries and a vibrant community 3) Lots …

Diving into the Rabbit Hole - On Getting into Programming

 Jan 13 2019

My first experience in formalized programming study was through Bob Tabor's Channel 9 video series . I went through his introductory HTML5/CSS3,

Udemy WIP Courses

Jan 12 2019

A list of Udemy Courses currently enrolled in. Various levels of completion and priority. Udemy won't let me rank my open courses based on my …