Day 1 was... a success? I read all of the book's preämble in case there was anything usefull hidden in there (there wasn't.)

The book goes over installing Python, and the author explains getting deadsnakes installed and setting up different versions of Python. Problem: deadsnakes isn't available for Rasberry Pi. I searched for an alternative, and there's something called pyenv. Cool. If it works it works.

So I got pyenv set up, ran the commands to install Python, and it was already installed and up to date Cool. But, the author goes over installing and setting up different versions of Python, so I got all of that translated into pyenv commands and ran them... only for them all to fail. You can fetch a list of available versions, but getting them set up doesn't seem to be an option. I'm not sure why. Okay, that's just a side project, I want to dig in to the meat of this book, so it was time to move on.

I wrote up a simple Hello world! which could have been achieved by simply typing Hello world! into the console. So...

Anyway, next came getting sidetracked again.

The author harps on VS Code for a bit, so I looked around to see if I could find this program for Rasberry Pi, which was like chasing a chicken with its head cut off. The installer program couldn't find it, so I did a websearch to see where I might find it.

It turns out that VS Code is short for Visual Studio Code, which is a Microsoft product. When I searched for that in the installer, tons and tons of unsorted, seemingly unrelated stuff came up. I tried to look through it, until I noticed how incredibly slowly the scrollbar was moving as I went down the list.

Okay, new search term: Visual-Studio-Code, with dashes instead of spaces. This pulled up what I was looking for right away and— it's already installed? Huh. So I opened it.

The first thing I saw was a large panel for an LLM chatbot "AI" assistant. Ew. Next I started reading through the terms, and saw that using this program would open my computer up to Microsoft telemetry tracking. Ewwwwwwwww. To borrow a term from the kids, this is the definition of Microslop. So I nuked VS Code.

However, Matthes seems pretty set on the idea of using VS Code, and looking through the program it had a lot of useful features, so maybe there's an open source alternative? And there is! VS Code is based on some old MIT license stuff, and an open source variant called VS Codium is out there. I put VS Codium into the installer and... nothing.

Ah! Sometimes it goes just by "codium," so I searched for that!

Still nothing.

It turns out, the only simple installer that keeps track of VS Codium is something called Snap, which is not included with the Rasberry Pi OS that's flashed onto the SD card I'm using. I kinda want to keep things stripped down for now, I don't want to add a new installer for the sake of one program.

But this is Linux. We can build from scratch, right? All you have to do is find the files, right?

So I look for the codium stuff on github, and it's there, but it's all 64 bit, and I'm running the 32 bit version of Rasberry Pi OS. So, do I want to flash a new card and do all that stuff? No. There's an old 32 bit version if you dig for it, so I did. Long story short, I don't yet know enough about downloading and compiling programs from scratch on Linux to have gotten this to work, so mission aborted. I'll use the built in text editor in Python mode and that will be that. Codium can come later.

Thus ends Day 1.