Alright, let me tell you about my “20 of 67” adventure. It’s a bit messy, but hey, that’s how real learning happens, right?
So, I kicked things off by deciding to tackle this coding challenge – something about image processing, if I remember correctly. I thought, “Yeah, I’ve messed around with Python before, how hard can it be?” Famous last words, I swear.
First step was to get my environment set up. I downloaded Anaconda because someone online said it was the bee’s knees for data science. Took a bit to figure out the whole virtual environment thing, but I got there eventually. Felt like a proper coder at that point, setting up my workspace and all.
Then came the actual code. I started by trying to read the image file. Simple enough, right? Nope. Kept getting some weird error about a missing DLL. Googled it for what felt like an eternity, finally found a Stack Overflow thread that suggested installing Pillow. Boom! Image loaded. High five to the internet.
Next, the challenge wanted me to do some filtering – make the image grayscale, then apply a blur. Sounded easy enough. I found some code snippets online using NumPy for image manipulation. Tried copy-pasting, and of course, it didn’t work right away. Spent a good hour debugging some array indexing issue. Turns out, I was flipping the rows and columns. Rookie mistake, I know.
The blur was even worse. Tried a few different convolution kernels, but everything looked either too blurry or not blurry enough. Ended up tweaking the kernel values manually until I got something that looked decent. Probably not the most scientific approach, but hey, it worked!
Biggest hurdle? Definitely understanding the NumPy array operations. I’m used to working with lists and dictionaries, not multi-dimensional arrays. Had to really wrap my head around broadcasting and slicing. Watched a few YouTube tutorials that helped a ton.
What did I learn? Patience, mostly! And that Stack Overflow is my best friend. Also, I realized I need to spend more time actually understanding the underlying math behind image processing. Copy-pasting code only gets you so far. And the importance of virtual environments. I was installing packages all over the place before using a virtual environment and it was a complete mess.
Overall, “20 of 67” was a bit of a grind, but I learned a lot. It wasn’t pretty, but I got the job done. On to the next challenge!
