#085 - Flocode Python Essentials Course | Free on GitHub

A complete, open-source course for professional engineers to learn the fundamentals of Python.

To the Flocode community,

Thank you for your patience. I know it’s been a while since I first announced the Python Essentials course, and I appreciate the support and engagement you’ve shown through the newsletter. Life, as it does, has been a balancing act between demanding project work, family, and this community.

Today, I’m excited to announce that the Flocode Python Essentials course is complete, and I’m releasing it for free on GitHub.

This course was a long time in the making. I initially invested a significant amount of effort into producing a polished video curriculum. But the more I worked on it, the more I realized it violated a core Flocode principle: pragmatism.

Busy professionals don’t have 30 hours to watch me describing calculations and code syntax. The real learning in programming comes from doing, from exercising the mental gymnastics required to think programmatically.

Most engineers learn fastest from clear, concise documentation and practical examples they can tinker with.

So, I scrapped the video plan and rebuilt the entire course as a comprehensive, text-based resource on GitHub. It’s structured into eight core modules, supported by hands-on Jupyter notebook examples.

Here’s a breakdown of what’s included:

• Core Fundamentals: You’ll start with the essentials, syntax, variables, data structures, control flow, and functions.

• A Robust Development Environment: Learn how to set up a professional, repeatable engineering system using modern tools like VS Code and the uv package manager.

• Pragmatic Workflows: Master the use of Jupyter notebooks for exploratory calculations, documentation, and sharing results.

• Hands-On Engineering Examples: Apply what you learn with practical exercises, including beam analysis, load combinations, material property management, and iterative design calculations.

The course is designed to be completed in 2-6 hours, focusing on the battle-tested skills you can immediately apply to your own work.

Examples are purposely simple to get ideas across. Deeper calculations can be built on the fundamentals included in the example notebooks.

There are many links to side quests which will take you down deeper rabbit holes, should you wish.

My hope is that this course allows you to learn much faster than I did. I learned much of this the hard way, through trial and error. By open-sourcing this material, I believe the goodwill and the potential to help fellow engineers avoid that same friction is far more valuable than putting it behind a paywall.

This is just the beginning. I plan to develop more courses with a similar structure to cover other specific, high-leverage topics in the future.

Thank you again for your continued support. It’s what makes this work possible.

You can access the full course here: Flocode Python Essentials on GitHub

See you on the inside.

James 🌊