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Discussion on: Welcome Thread - V19

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jacobvarney profile image
jacobvarney

Hey y'all, I'm Jacob 👋

I'm currently following my long dormant interest in a career where programming is a major focus. I currently get to do a bit in my current role as an instructional designer: I'm called the "Spreadsheet Wizard" for the complicated webs of queries and VLOOKUPs that I make in Google Sheets. I do some computations with Python for a math professor (related to some concepts that I've long forgotten about). I see back-end web development as a fun option to create apps for people, although web hosting continues to scare/confuse/excite me even as I haven't gotten there yet.

I've done the Django tutorial on their main website and am currently working through a book called "Django 4 the Impatient".

Otherwise, I'm hyped for Splatoon 3 and playing that with my wife 🙌

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kris_mariyanov profile image
Kristian

Jacob, thanks for the introduction. I admire people that are not scared to work with VLOOKUP. Sadly, I'm not one of these people 😅

I see that you know Python. Have you tried different programming languages?

I'm interested in how you decided to start writing a book. I have some similar ideas in mind too, but I keep postponing them for the future when I will be a "better expert" in the field. How do you handle this problem?

BTW, I like the book title.

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jacobvarney profile image
jacobvarney

As the... data engineer-type person (?) for my larger team, I do a lot to help manage and organize some of our data stored in Google Sheets and deal with other people's data in Google Sheets. I live and die by VLOOKUP and QUERY to make usable views.

I tried Ruby when taking a Coursera course and trying The Odin Project once. Other than that, I haven't ventured far beyond the Java and C that I learned in college and Python.

I'm actually only reading the book :) I like the idea of writing, but haven't quite made that leap to "think out loud online". I also feel like I need some expertise, but my studying is making me think that I could just summarize what I'm learning in writing to get my feet wet.