Many years ago I decided to start learning something new every year. I’ve learnt how to play the flute, Modular Origami, how to build peruvian quena flutes, japane cousine…and the my interest for programming really started in 2006 when my sister-in-law introduced me to ubuntu linux.

Since then I started using linux on my personal computers, and i just loved it. Ok, I know this is not really programming yet but learning to work with a terminal it was just how it felt. I felt like a hacker hacking the insides of my own computer.

In 2009 I’d decided to start a blog to write about endurance sports trainning for my athletes called EspiritoOudoor (Outdoor Spirit in Portuguese), my expectation was that the site would only have a hundred views in a month from just my athletes. But, after some time the site gained visibility, the hits grew and in 2010, I won the 2nd best sports blog award in Brazil. In the process of maintaining this site I learn a little about html and php.

But I never dared to dream about learning to program. At the time, information was not as available as it is today and I thought programming was for nerds, geniuses or gifted people. But in 2021 i read a post by coach Allan Couzen that made me reflect on the subject and, in addition to my financial situation, I decided to start trying to learn how to code.

Fast forward to 2022, I starter learning how to code. After a little bit of research on free resources i found The Odin Project where I started the foundation path and studied Git, html and CSS (I didn’t do the java script part). This beginning was fundamental to familiarize myself with some tools, the IDE and understand a little more about the tools and the different programming areas.

This beginning was fundamental to familiarize myself with some tools, the IDE and understand a little more about the tools and the different programming areas.
Talking to a friend who has been a hardcore programmer for many years, he suggested to me to learn python as a first language, which would be easier to learn, can be used for many functions and would allow me to get a glimpse of how programming works before defining my study journey (data, front-end, back-end, mobile…).

With that in mind I started sudying Python using both codecademy‘s and python.org tutorials. I am following codecademy’s beginners python course but am constantly consulting python org’s documentations when I have a doubt. And that is how I have started to learn how to code 7 weeks ago.

I must tell you, i really love my work. After many years working as a endurance sports coach I still get thrilled with my work. But things are not going so well at the moment.

To be able to explain it to you we must go back a little in time. In Mach 2020, my wife asked for the divorce after a 10 year relationship (my son was turning 3 at the time). If that wasn’t enough it happened just 4 days before the first pandemic lockdown.

In the lockdown as a professional sports coach, altought I worked part time coaching athletes remotly, my presencial activities were ceased for almost 6 months, at the time, physical activities in groups and in gyms were prohibited. This, along with the divorce process, has profoundly affected my income.
It was a hard period, which I was only able to recover by having obtained a financial aid from the government that allowed me to survive during the period.

The problem is, my business situation hasn’t improved much after the relaxation of covid restrictions. My clients look to me to help them in the preparation of sporting events such as triathlons, marathons and mountain bike races, as sporting events were banned for almost a year (returning only in mid-2021), the situation has not improved much.

Today, my company’s is still not profitable and the payment installments of financial aid began to be charged. This forced me to look for an alternative to supplement my income and made me turn my attention to programming. But I’ll tell you more about this in the next post!