Programming

Awfully proud of myself today. I wrote little program to scratch an itch, I had. It’s still rough, but it does what I want it to, and that makes me happpy. I go to Poetry Foundations’ Poem of the Day ever so often to catch a poem. And I wondered, what if the daily poem showed up in my RSS reader everyday? I searched and unfortunately couldn’t find a feed. So I did the next best thing. Armed with my newly acquired, Python knowledge, I set out to see if I could just get a link to a new poem daily. And what I ended up doing was writing a program, that scraped the webpage metadata for the date, compared it to today and if it was, created a baby xml feed for me, that I have now put into my reader. ...

This probably will be a few days of bike shedding. I finally came up with a problem, I want to solve for myself and then realised, I don’t know enough command line fu to integrate my stuff with my operating system, the way I like. So I am going to spend time, learning how to use the bash shell. Been searching, copying and modifying scripts for far too long now. Best to get this skill in my kitty as soon as I can possibly learn it. ...

Realised that while I do know rough and tumble basic Python, I have a long way to go before I can do things or even understand things. Half of my frustration writing, is because I cannot do the things, I want to do, and I struggle along and by the time, some generous friend shows me or I find the answer on the net, I realise that I don’t know this part of Python at all! I have a vocabulary problem. I know to talk like a child, not communicate like an adult. ...

With my area in near-quarantine, I was too busy rushing around, making sure family was ok. Had a lot of patches of free time, in the middle of things though. So I decided to read about algorithms. I know I need a good base in the future, and knowing about the turtles that underlie my new world. I decided to start small, and picked up Grokking Algorithms. I loved it. It taught me about the big low hanging basic problems that folks need to solve using computers and the patterns / recipes / algorithms we use to solve it. Problems like how to sort stuff (selection sort, quicksort) And how we can break down a big problem into a set of similar problems that get smaller and smaller and solving them all using a single solution from the inside of the problem onion, outwards, or from the smallest Matryoshka doll to the largest. (recursion) And how lists function and how to find the most efficient way to get from point A to point B. It covers a set of the basic algorithms in use today and has plenty of pointers to more efficient ways of how things are done in the real world and also where to find more advanced problems. ...

To get over the hump of just blindly following videos, and after some talking over with Kushal, we got to me solving problems that he would gimme. So now I can alternate between a regular path and real world practice. The first couple were about using psutil to do various things. The first one would give me back my CPU and memory usage, while the other one gives me what programs are using the network on which ports. This was fun to do! ...

Done with a new app! This one is a small app that searches for some text you want, through a folder full of files. I learnt about try / except blocks. this was necessary to catch non text files. learnt about recursive programming. I understand it in principle now. I need more practice. learnt about generators. This too, I get in principle, but need lots more practice. Code’s here on Gitlab and on Github. ...