Relearning Python

I have an interview on Friday, for a Python role. I haven’t written much Python since 2017, but prior to that I did it full-time for more than a decade. I’ve been brushing up, getting up to date. Thus far it’s been like getting back on a bike; I’m not too worried.

To help, I am trying out LeetCode. It gave me a scare: the “easier” exercises were hard. It was only when I moved onto the “hard” exercises and found them easy that I relaxed. The easy exercises are problems that new programmers practice but will rarely use in a job, whereas the hard exercises are more like problems one gets exposure to building “real” software.

Relearning Golang

I have been a skeptic since 2015 or so, when I worked on a Go codebase for a few months. It did the job, but the language was ugly and one was required to adopt a mental model of water-damaged IKEA shelves to use it. Time has passed and Go has become more popular. Inexplicably decent software has been built with it. It was time I looked again. If nothing else, there are a lot of Golang jobs around, and I am in need of a job; it would be convenient if I could learn to like it.

I’ve been journalling my experience, with the intention to publish it here. Right now the writing feels too bitter and nit-picky. You can guess perhaps at how it’s going.

I have been toying with the idea of working through Writing An Interpreter In Go. However, my impression of Go has not yet improved significantly since 2015, and investing more time and effort into the language would be falling for a sunk cost fallacy. We’ll see.

I already have a copy of Crafting Interpreters so maybe I’ll go through that instead. The downside is that it uses Java and C, two languages as moribund as Go in my appreciation. But at least I don’t have to buy another book.

Fit 4 Start

Fit 4 Start is a Y-Combinator-like incubator which:

… provides entrepreneurs with intensive coaching and mentoring, attractive equity-free funding and access to key networks that help them succeed with launching their business venture and scaling it on the European market.

I have 12 days to put together an application. I plan to make a proposal around my pgdo project, but I’m suffering from a crisis of self confidence: it’s not good enough; the prototype is not compelling; I can’t sell myself; I don’t have a second founder and who, frankly, is going to work with me? and so on. I will know in 12 days if I have overcome my panic.