Python

Extremely tight and busy day today. But still made the time to watch the videos for the next challenge in the course. As a matter of fact, I think this is what I should do. If I am in office, I ought to watch videos. And spend the time at home when I can coding. What videos? The next little project they have involves data structure basics. So today’s videos took me through lists and tuples and dictionaries. And with this, I call it a day. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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.