50, N, 10, 2, 100

Eh?! A short note…

This post is not this week’s article. It’s a note to let you know I’m delaying the next article. Here’s why…although I can’t tell you why yet.

Let’s start with those cryptic numbers in the title:

• 50: The previous article was the 49th on The Python Coding Stack. This means that (excluding this one which doesn’t count), the next one is a milestone…

• N: I couldn’t have timed it better if I tried. I just reached a “nice round number” of subscribers. This matters to me as it tells me that people like what I write and find it useful.
  But I never succumbed to the endless announcements of follower counts or subscriber counts. Here on Substack, I have mentioned this from time to time in the past, but elsewhere (Twitter), I always stayed clear of these types of “announcements”, and I’ll be avoiding them here, too.
  Number of subscribers doesn’t really matter. Whether you’re the only reader, or one of 8 billion subscribers, it doesn’t change your experience of reading an article (good or bad). Yes, the marketing specialists will tell me that such announcements have a positive psychological effect on the audience, making them feel a part of a growing, successful group, but I make my own rules… No more subscriber number announcements from me.

• 10: Well, this is not a milestone as such, but The Python Coding Stack will be 10 months old by the time I publish my 50th article. This concludes the title[:3] slice of the tuple in the title. [You see, there’s some Python in this note, too.] How about the remaining two numbers?
  
  It’s not all just about The Python Coding Stack…

• 2: Two is the number of platforms I launched in the past two months: The Python Coding Place, where I’m building a community of motivated Python learners who like my style of communication (and there are plenty of video courses for them), and Codetoday Unlimited, which is a platform for curious, ambitious teenagers and preteens who want to learn proper coding in Python.
  [In case you’re wondering, this publication, The Python Coding Stack, falls under The Python Coding Place’s banner. But I’m sure you had guessed that already from the name!]

• 100: ??

The last number represents another important milestone, the most important of all of them for me personally. But this is the one I can’t tell you about just yet. And no, it doesn’t represent a number of people…

My plan is to combine all these milestones and “the 100 announcement” into a celebratory article that merges some personal reflections with a Python tutorial. You’re here for the Python articles, after all, so I thought I’d better smuggle in the “personal reflections” part in a tutorial-y article.

But I’m still a few days away from being able to talk publicly about “the 100”. I’ve always published articles with about 5-8 day intervals (which is why I’m approaching the 50th in 10 months since starting The Python Coding Stack). This note is to let you know that I haven’t forgotten about you. How can I?! But I’m waiting so I can make my 50th article a “milestone article” and include all the milestones, including the most important one.

And it will include some Matplotlib animations, too. That’s all I’ll say.

I’ll be back soon…