Python

Only a few more videos done on the Corey run. But those were important ones. I finally got classes. Like got, got them. And I learnt about subclasses and dunder methods and decorators and getters and setters and all that jazz. And I understood it all. And now when I sit to code or read other people’s code, it won’t be as frustrating. And the more I watch and practice and read code, the more I seem to understand. Python seems to be slowly getting into my muscle memory. A dam seems to have broken. I don’t struggle as much. (That could also mean, I am not reading complicated code yet :P) ...

Chugging through. The weekend’s been busy with health stuff. But did watch a few videos. 39 of 127, done.

Had decided to play hookey and start up another personal mini project. But went down the rabbit hole of how to set up arguments. And everytime I research something Python related, I end up with one of Corey Schafer’s videos. So I decided to run through his entire Python playlist over the next few days. Will try to do this quickly, skipping over the parts I do know. 22 out of 127 videos done. ...

Finally got the program done! I wanted to write a program that would just get the latest comic from turnoff.us and save the picture to a file. In the course of writing this little program, I learnt about the basics of context handlers I learnt about the os module in Python I learnt how to scrape a web page using requests, beautiful soup and feedparser. (I was going to originally scrape the web page, but then realised that processing the rss feed would be more efficient. I think it’ll also help me extend/improve the program better, later. It helped me practice, slicing and dicing Python lists and dictionaries and getting data out of them. I learnt how to write and save files to disk. This was really fun to do. I see a million ways to take this dinky, little program forward. It could do the whole site for example or download only after comparing the state of the rss feed and fetching new entries etc. It has no error handling at all currently, and I prefer to have very safe, very conservative programs as a user. So lots of work to do. I leave all this for a later date though, while I now forge ahead with my #100DaysOfCode journey. Getting back to the challenges of the course itself, tomorrow onwards. ...

Did a video session again today, since I came back late from the doc. Watched videos about building a small d&d game, using classes. This was fun :) Working on the challenge will be exciting. And then some more on list comprehensions and generators. I had one aha, about tools as I watched this. The instructor used a regular expression to process a list and that little line, cut down his code by lots. That made me realise that programming is simply picking up the right tool for the job, and that there are a plethora, to do the work you need to do. One is not necessarily better than the other, just that some are better suited to the job at hand, than others. Revised how list comprehensions and generators work. And like a dork, I just realised that the operative thing is comprehension. You write in a comprehensive way to build some sort of collection. A list comprehension to write lists, a dictionary comprehension to build a dictionary, a generator comprehension to … well, you get the idea :) ...

Watched the video on the upcoming challenge to learn testing code. Sounds challenging. There are classes and decorators, which I have not worked with, but just read about. Will see how it goes. The idea of test driven development though, seems right up my alley.