Personal development - cortadocodes

Overview

This repository documents my personal development as a software engineer and Python programmer. It includes:

• Projects I've proposed to hone my skills
• Topics I've identified as important to study and practice
• Courses I plan to take
• Books I intend to read
• Certifications I gain as I work through my plan
• Best practices and useful commands/information I've found along the way (e.g. commit message formats or ideal package structures)
• Questions I currently have

Together, these form a plan and a measure of my progress; as such, this repository will be added to, changed and improved over time.

Proposed projects

Project	Location	Status
Automate my finances	finances-automation	Active
Easy rental search	easy-rental-search	Active
Raspberry Pi home security system	pi-security	Active
Renewable energy dashboard	renewable-energy-dashboard	Not started
Voice coding package	voice-coding	Not started
Hack my Dyson air purifier	hack-dyson-purifier	Not started
Scraped lyric generator using Markov chain	scraped-lyric-generator	On hold; requires refactor/restructure
Scrape engineering job listings	scrape-job-listings	Not started

Other projects:

• Set up a VPN server on a cloud-based virtual machine
• Create an inventory system keeping track of when products need to be rotated and notifying the owner when this is the case
• Scrape interest rates of various financial products over time and plot them on a live dashboard
• Traverse the network of dependencies in a python package and produce a graph illustrating their linking structure (e.g. for visual inspection for circular imports)

Topics for study

This is the list of topics I have identified for further study and investigation.

Topic	Details	Status
Advanced use of git (rebasing, squashing, tagging, hooks etc.)	Here	Completed
Virtual environments	Here	Completed
Regex (theory and practical use)	Here	Completed
Bash and shell control in depth	Here	Completed
Creating CLIs in python with argparse	Here	Completed
Web scraping with requests and beautifulsoup4	Here	Active
PostgreSQL; creating, hosting and interacting with databases	Here	Active
Docker	Here	Active
Clean code and architecture	Here	Active
Compression and archiving	Here	Active
Python multiprocessing library	Here	Active
Context managers	Here	Active
Generators and yield	Here	Active
Interacting with and building RESTful APIs	Here	Active
Python packaging in depth	Here
Testing and mocking with pytest in depth	Here
Use of PyCharm in depth	Here
Python decorators	Here
Linux command line utilities	Here
HTTP conventions	Here
Memory architectures	Here
Digital Ocean and Terraform	Here
Setting up a gittea mirror
Lambda functions
Ansible
Daemons
RabbitMQ and Celery
File I/O including binary files and streams (including text wrappers and the python io libary)
Python classes in depth (including @classmethod and @staticmethod)
Abstract base classes
Principles of Test Driven Development (TDD)
Error handling in Python
os and sys python libraries
Python set operations
matplotlib and seaborn
Markdown vs reStructuredText
Sphinx documentation
Encoding
Storage formats e.g. csv vs parquet vs pickle
Google cloud platform in depth
Continuous integration and deployment
Mapping
Hashes
Machine learning libraries
The basics of Go
Use of vim in depth
Static-typing in Python
Hexagonal architecture
Python GUIs and graphics
Hosting webservers using e.g. Nginx
pandas.groupby objects further in depth
NoSQL databases; mongoDB
Cybersecurity basics for engineers
HypothesisWorks tests
Kubernetes
Spark and Hadoop
ElasticSearch
Airflow
Scala
Kafka
Blockchain basics

Possible courses

Smaller courses

These are generally shorter and lower cost courses.

Course	Provider	Cost	Certified	Completed
How to use Git and GitHub	Udacity	Free	No	2018-08-09
GCP Essentials Quest	Qwiklabs	Subscription	Yes	2018-08-17
Learn SQL	Codecademy	Subscription	No	2018-08-25
SQL: Analyzing Business Metrics	Codecademy	Subscription	No	2018-08-25
SQL: Table Transformation	Codecademy	Subscription	No	2018-08-26
Intro to Relational Databases	Udacity	Free	No
Computer Science Fundamentals	Brilliant	Subscription	No
Computer Science Algorithms	Brilliant	Subscription	No
Computer Memory	Brilliant	Subscription	No
Intro to Computer Science	Udacity	Free	No
Software Development Process	Udacity	Free	No
GCP - Infrastructure and DevOps	QwikLabs	PAYG	Yes
GCP - Big Data	QwikLabs	PAYG	Yes
GCP - Security, Backup & Recovery	QwikLabs	PAYG	Yes
GCP - Websites & App Dev	QwikLabs	PAYG	Yes
GCP - Machine Learning	QwikLabs	PAYG	Yes
Intro to Machine Learning	Udacity	Free	No
Artificial Neural Networks	Brilliant	Subscription	No
Machine Learning	Brilliant	Subscription	No
Practical Deep Learning For Coders (Parts 1 and 2)	fast.ai	Free	No

Larger courses

These are generally deeper and higher cost courses.

Course	Provider	Cost	Certified	Started	Completed
Programming for Data Science	Udacity nanodegree	£349	Yes
Become a Professional Full Stack Developer	Udacity nanodegree	£799	Yes
Become a Machine Learning Engineer	Udacity nanodegree	£799	Yes
Machine Learning for Data Scientists	Udacity nanodegree	£1598	Yes

Books for study

Book	Author	Area
'Fluent Python: Clear, Concise, and Effective Programming'	Luciano Ramalho	Python
'Computer Science: An Overview'	J. Glenn Brookshear	Computer science
'Code Complete 2: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction'	Steve McConnell	Software engineering
'Pro Git (v2)'	Scott Chacon and Ben Straub	Version control (git)
'Python Machine Learning (Second edition)	Sebastian Raschka & Vahid Mirjalili	Python, machine learning
'The DevOps Handbook:: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations'	Gene Kim, Patrick Debois, John Willis	DevOps
'Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and Devops: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations'	Gene Kim, Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble	DevOps