After roughly two hours of hard work, I’ve finished my first program ever. It’s nothing I’m going to release, and it’s not a big money maker, but I’m very satisfied. I’ve learned a lot about programming, and a lot about my personal limits

What it really taught me about programming on the large scale is that I really needed to start with something small, and work my way up. I knew what I wanted the program to do, and I knew what the eventual upgrades I wanted would be. Mentally, I prepared a list of steps, and little by little, I crossed them off my list, until I got to the first working stage. From there I perfected the code and even wrote an optional module to work side by side with the program. The second thing I learned was that I really love Python. I feel a lot more productive in it, and I seem to have gotten farther faster, and I’m better all around with it than I ever was with C++.

The program itself was pretty simple in theory. I’m a premium user at rapidshare.com, and I download a lot. The problem is that RS has a 100mb file limit. So any real file is broken into parts (I hate parts!). So, normally I search through a bunch of garbled, escaped and unformatted HTML to get the links, and one by one copy the URLs into FireFox. What I wanted was a program that would open all the links from a file. So, I made the .txt file, and wrote the program. It has now evolved to take that bunch of code, and transform it into a neat little .txt file, automatically load the links, and open them in tabs in FireFox (the number of links is specified by the user).

So, it’s not much, but I’m really proud. I never thought I would be able to do it, but I did. Maybe now I’ll have the confidence to move onto something bigger. We’ll see.