# $GENRE python development fellowship - pt. 1 intro By [funish](https://paragraph.com/@funish) · 2022-01-14 --- Hi, hello, howdy! Welcome to part 1 of the coding fellowship. My name is David (he/him/his) and I live in Chicago with my wife and son. I’m a musician first and foremost, and every line of code I’ve ever written has essentially been means by which to keep creating - though lately feeding and housing my family is also a major factor. I wrote my first chunk of Python around 2001, using a template for a bot in mIRC (truly dating myself here) to download skate videos and MP3’s (Toy Machines Welcome to Hell, and Autechre Incunabula respectively were the first things I pirated, I’m proud to say at 36 I now own these in earnest.). A lot of my career has centered around a lot of languages (I spend a large chunk of it in the Ruby on Rails community) but at every job for better or worse Python has always been around in some capacity. It is the gold standard for Data Science (sorry R), any UNIX scripting beyond the scope of shell scripts (sorry Perl), and is quickly squashing Java nicely into the ground as a go to for Web2 backend development (even without native multithreading!). It is my strong belief that it’s explicit nature (white spacing anyone?), lower barrier of entry, and wealth of community support and documentation make it the perfect first programming language. As Web3 enthusiasts, what better way to explore Python than by writing our own Blockchain from start to finish! This sounds daunting, but it really isn’t. Python is very object oriented at it’s core (more on that later!), and one of the core data structures in the language is the dictionary - in its simpleist form a dictionary is a collection of key value pairs - e.g. {“key” : “value”} or {“day” : “Thursday”} - it also happens to be a great data structure to create JSON (more on that later) and to implement a simple blockchain. This cohort will begin on Tuesday 1/25/22 - a few things to familiarize yourselves with / install / research in the meantime: * lets all use VSCode as our editor for this - it's cross platform and has all of the integrations and extensions we need to make this nice and streamlined - yes I know it's a Microsoft product, but unfortunately it's kind of the best. This coming from a former Vim user. * you'll need to install Docker - google it, it's easy. * work through this getting started for python installation - [https://docs.python-guide.org/](https://docs.python-guide.org/) - we'll be using version 3.x.x so just install the newest version * if you're not familiar with the command line (I'm teaching on a mac and I use the zsh shell it comes with) - work through this: [https://tutorial.djangogirls.org/en/intro\_to\_command\_line/](https://tutorial.djangogirls.org/en/intro_to_command_line/) (also this is an amazing tutorial across the board!) * feel free to message me direct if you have questions / comments / concerns - I'm big into mindfulness and I use a lot of that practice in my creative and technical pursuits so I encourage everyone to set an intention for this fellowship * my plan is to have this ironed out and ready next week, and we'll start the following week - feel free to invite others in the meantime but to keep the size reasonable I'll close entry to this cohort next Friday (1/21/22) Feel free to hit me via email - david {at} beale.sh Ok, awesome - very excited! \--DB --- *Originally published on [funish](https://paragraph.com/@funish/genre-python-development-fellowship-pt-1-intro)*