Home Learning Day Two : Terminal Velocity
Today wasn’t such a difficult day. I dare say today was a good day. A good day for science. After the havoc that the Car Class wrecked on me yesterday, anything would have been better really. That’s saying a lot. I am clearly still traumatised by that experience.
Moving on. Where was I? Yes, day two. We had a couple of labs today, not too difficult but not trivial in any sense:
- Word Count — Some pretty advanced string manipulation required here to count occurrences of a word in a string of text. Sounds easy, right? Not until you realise you have to consider i18n, numbers, and also punctuation marks as “words”
- Max and Min Number — Given two lists, return elements that are not present in both. This had lots of other rules that I won’t get into right now
The third task today was titled HTTP & Web and just the title had me all tingly with excitement. Wait, it gets even better.
[Write] a simple command line [terminal] application that consumes a Public API using a HTTP client library
That was the brief. You can see why I was excited right? No? I’ll tell you either way. I love the terminal. I live there, I drop into a shell and call out “Honey, I’m home!!”. I’m getting ahead of myself.
I immediately got to work finding an API to play with. After a couple of minutes on this little site called Google, I found it. I found wordnik.com and it was perfect. I was in love. I was going to build an application that looked up the meaning (and pronunciation) of any word you threw at it. Now, if only I knew the first thing about Python HTTP libraries.
Back to that little site I went and also to another little known one they call stackoverflow (You probably haven’t heard of it) Insert hipster tone here. After dabbling with a couple of the libraries, I settled on the requests library partly because it had this warning on the homepage:
Warning: Recreational use of other HTTP libraries may result in dangerous side-effects, including: security vulnerabilities, verbose code, reinventing the wheel, constantly reading documentation, depression, headaches, or even death.
I wasn’t about to risk death. I had to use this library. You understand, right? It’s not you, it’s me. With that settled, I proceeded to read the docs. All the docs on that library. Very well written if you ask me and easy to understand too. I was on my merry way hacking away on my keyboard in no time. I might have gone a bit overboard with the code feeding off the excitement.
“But Mark, where can I find this application you wrote?” Good question, Margaret. I pushed the code to GitHub here (shameless self promotion):
Feel free to fork me and make any improvements.
What did I learn today?
- Some strings are more equal than others
- Python might be even better than Shell on the terminal
- Python offers so many tools to help you get things done. I love the ecosystem (yes, I am aware that is the second time I have used the word “love”. Thank you, Sherlock)
Tomorrow is that last day of the home learning sessions. I’ve had a glimpse of the tasks and one in particular looks threatening.
Check back tomorrow and I’ll let you know how it went.
