In April 2018, I was able to attend Cisco DevNet Create in Mountain View, CA as a Cisco Champion. The idea of seeing DevOps from the devs themselves had me intrigued. Which means I’m learning about this new term, NetDevOps.

Later on, this event would leave a positive impact on me. I’ll get to that later on.

I have zero knowledge of coding. Well, maybe not quite zero. I could do a simple print(“Hello world”) but that’s it.

In May 2018, I got myself a copy of Learn Python The Hard Way 3 and hit the ground running. Learning how to code is like learning networking from the beginning. It’s challenging at first but with practice you start learning the concepts. I went through it the first time within 30 days not really grasping it very well. So I took a break.

It’s now near the end of August and I took another dive into LPTHW3. Having understood the exercises better this time around, I began to feel like I might be improving and actually learning something.

Energy and persistence conquer all things.

Benjamin Franklin

After seeing what was possible at DevNet Create, I was left inspired. I was able to see what automated tasks you could perform with Python with the Meraki Dashboard API, how you can approve Cisco configs through WebEx Teams using API, among other useful tasks. It left me wanting more. But most of all, I wanted to create something. And here I am learning Python.

This is how I decide to hold myself accountable to learning something completely new. To write out my experience, my challenges, and my solutions. Welcome to the first entry of my coding journal.