How I Learned Python -- Will Sulowski

Posted on August 14 2025
Back in August of 2022, The Coders Who Travel Foundation reached out to me ( Will Sulowski ) about their new Veterans Can Code initiative to help veterans learn the fundamentals of programming and specifically, Python. Prior to this, I had attempted to take two short online classes on Python. Talk about overwhelming! I had no experience programming before these short classes and diving in headfirst into Python was difficult, if not seemingly impossible for me. I left feeling discouraged. I felt that coding was the one thing in my life that I was never going to be able to learn. This frustrated me even more because I have always prided myself in my ability to quickly learn challenging new things. I felt humbled.

When I was first reached out to by The Coders Who Travel Foundation , I felt a bit apprehensive. I was already feeling down from my previous encounter with coding and didn’t want to make myself feel worse about it than I already did. However, I have never been a quitter and have always had a desire to better myself. Coding was something I had always wanted to learn but never really had the opportunity to pursue. After pondering it for a week or so, I decided to give it a shot. What did I have to lose? Absolutely nothing.

So, beginning in August, we started meeting for about an hour and a half every Tuesday and Saturday. In the beginning, I was on leave from the Army and wasn’t scheduled to start my new job until September so, meeting twice a week didn’t require a great deal of effort on my part. However, once I began my new job, it became a little more demanding.

We started learning the very basics of programming with our first instructor, Akua Oseiwah Ahenkorah , who taught us about strings, integers, and if statements. I think this was probably the most important part of the course. It gave us the foundation we needed so that we could move on to some of the more advanced capabilities of Python and actually apply them to conduct data analysis.

Once we had established a basic understanding of programming and some of the specific details about how Python functions differently from other programming languages, our next instructor, William Ampeh , went in depth in showing the entire breadth of functions Python is able to do. To be honest, this was probably the most difficult part for me to learn. Looking back, I would have told myself to calm down and just understand the different concepts William was trying to show us. What he was trying to do was show us all the different tools in the Python toolbox that were available for us to use, not that we had to memorize every detail about every tool.

After getting our minds blown about all the different capabilities Python has, we started focusing on what would be our final project. For our project, we had to take a large dataset from the Bureau of Labor Statistics website of our choosing and do analysis on it using Python. Our next instructor, Theophilus Siameh , quickly became our new best friend when we realized that we needed help in learning how to use dataframes to organize and manipulate our dataset.

We learned a ton of different tricks regarding the many ways to achieve the same result with our dataframes. It was interesting to see how different instructors had their own preferences for achieving the same result. Once we had our data organized, we shifted gears to being able to visualize the data in a manner that could be explained to someone who did not understand coding. This was fun for me because I am a huge fan of visualization. It’s one thing to say something, but if you can SHOW your audience what you are talking about, your point is going to hit home a lot harder than if you’re just talking to someone.

Overall, I cannot believe how far I came in this class. There was one point at the end where I was working on my project and furiously typing away different lines of code. It may have only lasted about 3 minutes but immediately afterwards, I thought to myself, “Wow, I was really typing away on that keyboard like I knew what I was doing!” To be able to look back to that first week where I was experimenting with basic things like “1 + 1” to now typing code to plot a graph felt like a HUGE accomplishment to me.

I might not be a coding wizard yet, but it truly feels good to know that coding is something that I can do. The Coders Who Travel Foundation and 'Veterans Can Code' has really given me the confidence I needed to believe in myself and my ability to learn programming. I’m excited to begin my new career path outside of the military and know that if an opportunity comes up that requires basic knowledge of Python, I have a solid foundation for success in the future!

REVIEW

Overall, I really enjoyed being a part of this class. It gave me exactly what I was hoping to accomplish which was a baseline understanding of Python, how it works and what it can do. Coming from not being able to write any code at all, I was very pleased with what I ended up being able to do with Python. It was a great feeling knowing that it was possible for me to learn how to code, something that I had long felt was outside of my skillset. All the instructors were great and sought to help us as learn Python as best they could.

If there was anything I wish would have been different, I think I personally would have preferred a few take home assignments. For me, personally, I learn the most when I take what I’ve learned and apply it. Obviously, we applied it during the final project, however, I felt that some take home assignments along the way would have given me a little more confidence leading up to the final project. It might be a bit difficult finding the right balance between homework assignments and everyone’s busy schedule. Once I began working with Deloitte, I found that my time was a lot more squeezed than it was the first couple of weeks when we started and I was not working.

Overall, again, I am excited to take my newfound skill, continuing to learn more and applying it in the future!