Work

Slowly making my way through the Mastering Emacs book. Things I did / learnt today … Learnt that if I want to run Emacs all over the place (like I do), then the best thing to do is to have Emacs, running as a daemon in the background. So I did that via the handy systemd instructions, on this page. And that Emacs has a kitchen sink’s worth of commands. And that Emacs commands are like playing chords on the guitar or piano. You just hit a few of them in a sequence to get the desired sound (or action in this case) C-g, the Control and the G keys get me out of a jam, if I am stuck. Found Jess Hamrick’s really useful post, on moving about and buffers and frames and stuff. Got myself a basic emacs Anki deck. And I learnt how to move about. All in all, a pretty good day. ...

Life is really kicking my butt right now. And the 12th studies are not making it any easier. So am temporarily giving up on A Hundred Days of Code, again. Hopefully, I will have the time to give Python, in a month. In the meanwhile, with the limited time I do have, I’d like to learn me some Emacs. Will write about it everyday.

Follow my whole plodding, Flask journey here. Crashed and burned even harder today. Tried to retrace my steps and did all the exercises again. I reached, once more, all the way upto the forms chapter and it just does not work. Now it won’t even display my login page. Was it worth doing? Oh yes. I gained a much better understanding of how Flask works, of what is required where. Will work once more at the login page tomorrow. ...

Follow my whole plodding flask journey here.. Am still stuck at where I was yesterday. But made a tiny bit of progress. Yesterday, it would not even submit the form. And now I got it to do that. How? I had forgotten to close the form tag. Now while I see that it is posting perfectly in the terminal, I cannot get it to reply with a message saying that I indeed have logged in. ...

Follow my whole plodding journey here. Wrote a basic login form today. Short story short, it shows up, but it does not respond like Miguel shows in the course. It justs sits there … staring back at me … like an obstinate goat. Will go spelunking into what I could have done wrong, tomorrow. Learnt about adding routes and creating views and making templates. Thoroughly confused though. While I am dumbly following instructions right now, what I don’t get, is what do I need to write first? It all seems very circular to me. What comes first? The route, the form, the template, the chicken or the egg? ...

Continuing the Flask course. Learnt about seperation of concerns today. To me that means that I should try to keep related things together and disparate stuff apart. Case in point, we1 created a seperate file config.py to store the variables about the program in. And then to kind of secure it even more, instead of hardcoding the password in the file, it now looks for an environment variable, which I need to set before running the program. Another example was when we created a seperate file to process input (for our logins) and then put all the login, password etc. fields in there. This feels good. Feels like I am learning best practices and good habits already. ...