I will say up front that I expected to need to break my Python sessions into small, easily digestible segments. My (analog, handwritten) planner very clearly outlines the reticence I was feeling toward learning what felt like a new language and a new math rolled into one. Which is not to say that this is my first stab at coding; but as a few classmates have also written, my comfort zone is somewhat outside of what might be called proper coding. As a high school student, before options like WordPress or Squarespace were available, I created my own HTML website with an FTP client that made wonderfully 1980s-cartoon-style noises every time I uploaded a file. Later, I learned some CSS, and a tiny bit of PHP, though I had only the rare occasion to put either to use in any real way. As an archivist, I frequently encoded finding aids in the XML markup language EAD. Working in libraries and small non-profits, I rarely had a job where I wasn’t asked to customize a WordPress or Omeka template to make it look less like what it was: a template.

So the editor module is not entirely foreign to me, but the process of systematically learning a new language from scratch was intimidating, and I worried that I wouldn’t be able to make sense of it out of context. To put it another way: I felt some anxiety about simply learning for the sake of learning, and wondered if, without a specific problem to solve, would I actually grasp the meaning of the content, and further, would I be able to recall or apply it later? I was surprised to find that time flew by while I worked through the lessons, though I occasionally hit roadblocks where I was sure I was applying the rules appropriately, only to be repeatedly confronted with error messages (I’m looking at you, Conditionals & Control Flow). I would experiment with variations of what I thought I was supposed to be doing, and often found that only when I tried the variation that I was sure was wrong, the code finally worked.

While I worked through the Python lessons, I thought about how I might relate this to English studies, and in the most general sense, I felt that I was acquiring a set of skills that would allow me to navigate a breadth of ideas and content and, eventually, with practice, express my own original content, or a point of view, to communicate with others and contribute to a larger dialogue.

A few notes that I made while I worked:

1. The process of learning code is not dissimilar from the process of learning grammar and vocabulary. Eventually these will help in the framing of a more sophisticated narrative, but likely only after learning from a series of clumsier choices.
2. Reading lines of code in examples – not a great stretch from the practice of close reading. Again, much easier when you have an established foundation. Nothing clicks instantly, and practice and examination contribute to a cumulative knowledge over time.
3. From Python Syntax 5/13 Whitespace: “In Python, whitespace is used to structure code. Whitespace is important, so you have to be careful how you use it.” This is only barely paraphrasing conversations I remember from earning my BFA in poetry.
4. While the line structure and use of space share bear some resemblance to poetry, the coding process reminded me more of short stories – create the environment, establish the structure, make sure everything that’s included really needs to be included, leave out the elements that don’t contribute anything essential to the narrative.
5. For all the rules, and all the value of the rules, I suspect that code is more malleable than it feels when we are learning it, in the way that language is not as rigid as rules of grammar and sentence structure could make it seem. Once you learn what you are working with, you build on it and test the boundaries of what you can do outside the rules. This is how we can get new, weird, exciting art, and this is probably also how I can chop up someone’s well-constructed code to make the website my boss asks me to make, without completely destroying it.