First Week of LITG Program

I am Hansika Hewamalge, a final year student at the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. Getting selected to the second edition of the Learn IT Girl program was indeed an exciting news for me. As a student who applied to several open source programs such as Google Summer of Code and Outreachy but still did not stand a chance to get selected, I was quite motivated to apply for LITG program as a mentee to learn a new programming language. My primary objective of being a mentee at LITG program is to become a part of a worldwide female developer community sharing expert views and ideas while brushing up my skills in a preferred technology.

The programming language selected by me for the LITG program was C++ initially. Even prior to the first week of the program I had my first video call with my mentor, Ms. Tapasweni Pathak who is also an organizer of the second edition of LITG program. After several discussions with her during the first week of the program from February 15 to February 21, the programming language was changed to Python. This change of the programming language did not bother me as long as I can get my hands dirty in a new language not tried before. The finalized project plan is to develop an API(Application Programming Interface) to extract user details from the Quora website(https://www.quora.com/), throughout the next 11 weeks of the program. The project involves working with the Flask Framework to develop the API.

The time-line was set to explore various exciting and interesting technologies related to Python. During the first three weeks the primary task is to learn the basics of Python with the exercises at Learn Python the Hard Way( http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/ex0.html). Time management has become of extreme importance since my final year exams at the university are running in parallel during the first three weeks. My plan is to work approximately one hour everyday for a total of three days each week, during these first three weeks. In the first week , I completed the first two exercises at Learn Python the Hard Way. With these tutorials I am stepping into the world of Python day by day. The completed exercises were committed to the Github repository crated for learning Python(https://github.com/hansika/LearnPython). Another Github repository was created for the project including Readme files and .gitignore files(https://github.com/hansika/QUserAPI). I also updated the project details on the LITG website including this blog link and the link to the Github repository for the project. I have also started to write blog posts such as this one with details of my weekly progress and the challenges that I faced during that week. Of course I am eagerly looking forward to have a wonderful experience at the LITG program with a lot of new experiences collected each passing day.