Watched another Corey Schafer video on how to scrape web pages.
Thought that would be handy in my image from a web page download project.
Corey’s an awesome teacher. The video was fun and it taught me lots.

Then started hacking away at my little project.
And then realised that the site has rss feeds.
I could just process them instead of scraping a page.
Went looking for a quick way to do that.
Found the Universal Feed Parser.

Got the rss feed and am now playing with it.
That is all I had time for today.
But I learnt lots.
Will probably get back to the project on Wednesday.

Office beckons for the next two days.
Hope to keep up the streak by doing something productive though.

Today was fun!
Today was also the day, I realised, I actually love coding.
I have no clue how 4 hours passed me by!

Decided to take a break from the course, and do something for me.
I want to check a site and download new content if any.

The day went sideways though.
Did not quite do what I wanted.
Watched a video on how to setup Visual Studio Code just the way I wanted.
So not quite all wasted.

I cheated and peeked again at the solution :)
After five days, I think I needed help.
But it was still a very good day.
I learned lots.

When I started this little project, I saw videos about defaultdicts and namedtuples and then kinda forgot that they would be of some use to me in my project itself.
That realisation came yesterday.
Like they say, it happened very slowly and then all at once! I wrote up a quick workflow of how the program was supposed to work on paper.
And then I had a decisison to make.
Do I peek at the answer? or not?
In the end, I did.
I wanted confirmation of my thought process, and realised that if I was going to figure out the code itself, this would take much, much longer.
Besides, writing Python will come to me if I stick with this as I have been doing, so no guilt about copying code.

The instructors did solve the problem, exactly the way I envisioned it in my head :)
And the code, to my inexperienced fingers was tricky. (I don’t know lambdas or expressions in general and the instructor uses them liberally; a dictionary expression to populate a dict and a lambda to sort a list)
However I take small comfort in the fact, that I did, write one third of the code all by myself.
Just goes to show, how little fluency I have with the language.

But still! I am happy I got my thinking straight :)
Onwards!

Finally feels like something is happening.
Did two hours today.

I don’t know if what I do is cheating, but I darn near print everything to see output and then iterate on the errors.

I understood how to work with csv files and process them and why ordered dictionaries can be useful.
I used that to process my csv file and read and print select fields.

Will work on sorting them somehow and figure out frequency based on ratings tomorrow.

Pleased with myself. Today was a good day!

I have been at this an hour daily for four days now.
It just is not clicking for me.
One thing is for sure, this Talk Python course is definitely going to take longer than a hundred days!

I don’t know whether to be ashamed or proud.
Best to be unashamedly persistent, I guess.
More work, tomorrow.

Decided to watch the videos for day 4 since I am a day behind.
The exercises look complicated, but the collections module looks like a real time saver.

Will give it a go tomorrow.