Programming Throwdown, Episode 154, Python again with Jason C. McDonald.

Take it away, Patrick.

Welcome, everyone, to another episode.

Excited to have a guest here today who is going to help us to revisit Python.

I think Jason was saying has been about a decade since the last time we had Python as the topic of an episode.

I don't even remember what we were doing

back then. It feels like a long time ago. But, you know, excited to have it. I have a love-hate

relationship with Python. So I hear that there's going to be some work to sort of convince me

to drop the hate part and just embrace the love part. But maybe some of that comes from from years

ago. But I do respect that, you know, Python has in some way stood the test of time. It's really there. It's pervasive. And it's helped so many people get into programming. It's made so many advances. So I'm excited to talk about it. So as I mentioned, we have here today Jason C. McDonald. He is the principal Python engineering consultant at Rural Sourcing, and author of the book Dead Simple Python from No Start Press. Welcome to the show, Jason. Hey, thank you. Thank you for having me. Well, we typically start off all these interviews. I know, like, want to dig into Python. I'm already ramped up. I'm excited. Even though it's a little early in the morning when we're recording this, but I'm ready to go. Let's talk a little bit about how you got into tech or programming. Do you remember, like, your first computer or your first programming experience? Like, what was it that kind of like made it real for you? Oh, yes. Okay. Well, I have two first experiences. I would say my first first experience was when I was

14 and I wanted to do some coding to be able to build a game I was wanting to make. And so I fired

up Python, tried learning it, hated it. Not just Python. Program as a whole, hated it, despised the whole activity, was miserable

with it, gave up after two days, and vowed to never touch it again.

Fast forward several years.

By this point, I am on the other side of a traumatic brain injury.

Failed on a staircase, my sophomore

high school, hit my head on the banister, and went from a 4.0 sophomore college level reading

to failing pre-k material, had to work my way back up. The way I explain my head injury is if you're

familiar with the BBC sci-fi Doctor Who, I basically am the doctor in that it's still fundamentally me under here, but I have

actually had three head injuries in my life.

And each time it has fundamentally rewritten my personality, my skill set, my cognitive

ability, it's still me.

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