But I could sit down with a blank script and build something. A password generator. A web scraper for my favorite blog. A text-based RPG. More importantly, I could read other people’s code and understand what it was trying to do, even if I didn't know how .
The course forces you out of the nest. The projects—the infamous Milestone Projects —are where the real learning happens. You close the notebook, open a text editor, and realize that programming is not about getting the right answer in a cell. It’s about managing state, handling edge cases, and wrestling with scope.
You can get comfortable. You can start to believe that coding is a linear, cell-by-cell, no-consequences activity. Then you try to write your first standalone .py script—a simple blackjack game or a Tic-Tac-Toe AI—and suddenly, nothing works. Functions don’t share variables. The flow is broken. But I could sit down with a blank script and build something
Jose Portillo doesn't turn you into a hero. He hands you the sword, shows you how to hold it, and points you toward the dragon. The hero's journey? That’s up to you.
I enrolled in the four years late, in early 2024. I knew the syntax had probably aged, that the UI in the videos was from a pre-ChatGPT world, and that "hero" status in tech is usually measured in years, not hours. A text-based RPG
If you’ve dipped a toe into the world of online programming courses, you’ve seen it. The thumbnail with the bright red background. The confident, friendly face of Jose Portillo. The title that promises a transformation almost too audacious to believe: "From Zero to Hero."
You become a hero of the terminal —no longer afraid of the blinking cursor. You become a hero of the traceback —learning to read the red error text as a clue, not a curse. You become a hero of the whiteboard —able to break down a problem into loops, conditionals, and functions. and the environment setup feels… vintage.
Here is the deep, unvarnished truth about that journey. Let’s address the elephant in the room. The course says "2020." In tech, that might as well be a decade. You won’t learn the latest match statement (Python 3.10) or the newest async/await patterns. The projects don't use AI pair programming, and the environment setup feels… vintage.