I recently started messing with Python again and saw a challenge on a practice website. For context, I haven’t written any Python in a bit, so I wanted to scratch the itch and keep my knowledge alive.

The challenge was to create a program that asks for user input and does some math with their age to calculate what year they’d turn 100.

Here’s what I came up with:

current_year = 2026
name = ""
age = ""
yourage = 0


def main():
    print(f"Hello! What's your name?")
    name = input()

    print(f"\nAnd how old are you, {name}?")
    age = int(input())
    yourage = int(age)

    return name, yourage


def hundred(yourage, current_year):
    yearstohundo = 100 - yourage
    yearwillbe = yearstohundo + current_year

    print(f"\nYou will turn 100 in {yearwillbe}!")


name, yourage = main()
hundred(yourage, current_year)

If you run that program in the terminal you will get (regular text is my answers):

It’s been about a year since I last tried to “vibe code” and I used the normal Claude LLM to do so. The experience was okay, but frustrating. When using the standard chat interface, you have to be very specific about what you’re feeding the chat and make sure that you keep the context window fairly short, because eventually the tool will start hallucinating more and more as you go on.

In case you missed it, I’ve been blogging at Meditations and Marginalia. I’ve started using that more than this site for various reasons, but I may change my mind, depending on how things go in the future. I was having some issues with GitHub Pages, but that seems to be resolved now.

Moral of the story, check out the new site if you happen to stumble on this page.

Have you ever thought about going back to get a degree in your topic here?

I have. Many times.

Yet, I have never been able to personally justify spending tens of thousands of dollars to get a formal degree that may or may not provide a return on that investment. I signed up to do an MBA program several years ago with the University of Illinois, but ended up never taking a single class when I found out that most graduates with that degree don’t make significantly more than their non-MBA degree holding peers.

I recently read the book The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. If you are unfamiliar, it is an overview of Adlerian Psychology, also known as Individual Psychology.

I’ll admit that I had never heard of Alfred Adler or the psychology he was a proponent of, but I am glad that I gave this book a read. Unlike many psychology or self-help books, this one is written in the form of a narrative dialogue between a student and a mentor, which makes it very easy to read.