Yeah not a whole lot to report for obvious reasons. I sent back the 2020 Macbook Air and ordered a 2020 Macbook Pro...but it's not here yet. My work on Python continues, currently working on learning Flask so I can build web apps. I'd like to try to find something at least a little bit car related to do, I'm passively considering learning Swift next so I can make Mac/iOS apps, but I have a lot left to do before I feel like I have a good enough grasp of Python to move on to something else. 

I did order a new camera. I'm gonna let that one be a surprise, but it should be pretty rad. That's about it. I'm ready to get back to building cars, but not ready enough to get the 'Rona, so I guess I'm still in a holding pattern with that. As soon as I'm back at work I'm thinking it's megasquirt time to get the Miata ready for some boost. 

Also have a couple of other projects in mind, but I'm not even going to mention them until I've made a lot more progress on the Miata in an effort to combat my severe car ADD. 

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It all started with some downtime at home (Thanks worldwide pandemic!) and a reddit post by Al Swiegart, author of Automate the Boring Stuff with Python saying his Udemy course was free. I went ahead and "Purchased" it, and got started. It's a pretty solid course, but it's really more geared toward "I want to automate this office task" than "I want to learn to code and build things". I went in search of another course and landed on Andrei Neagoie's "Complete Python in 2020: Zero to Mastery", also on Udemy, and went for it. 

I seriously cannot recommend it enough, Andrei is an excellent instructor and really does cover damn near every part of Python, at least to the degree that you will know what to google and how to find information (which I'm quickly learning is basically the gist of programming). 

I decided to use my new found Python knowledge for a practical application; a maintenance tracker for the rental fleet. It only took me a day or so to build out a working CLI version. Command line isn't super intuitive though, so I decided I needed a GUI. I looked around and the most straightforward way seemed to be using the PySimpleGUI Library. It took a hell of a lot more time, but after a week or so of tinkering and sometimes lots of cussing, I did manage to get a working GUI version. 

In the process, I've totally fallen in love with programming, so I'm already looking around for the next thing I want to do, either with Python or maybe with another language. Daisy bought me a Pi Zero W for my birthday, so I think my immediate project is going to be to port the FleetManager app to flask/webapp so I can run it on a local server and access it from any computer on the network. Sounds like a good idea right? Anyway, here's a short little demo for the GUI version of the fleet maintenance app. Feel free to check me out on GitHub too.