Today I began learning Python and ended the day with a script that successfully automated a process for me. Nope, I’ve never written Python code before and don’t code for my day job. In fact, it’s been over 20 years since I first took an introductory computer science class. The most significant project I worked to completion was less than 500 lines of perl, an Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) translator for the odd purchase order format that our customer used. But I’ve laid out two goals for myself, work myself up to light scripting competence in Python and light analysis competence in R. OK, those two goals are over 10 years old, so what got me moving?