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100 Days of Python - Log

August 24, 2023

Today's Progress

  • Added probability of precipitation logic to the SMS Rain Alert
  • Found a potential bug in Python's code

Link to Work

Thoughts

  • Well today ended up being more eventful than I had anticipated. I was planning on starting Day 40's project, however finding a potential bug in Python's code kind of derailed me. I ended up running a few different things to test what I was seeing and make sure I was not just making a mistake, but in the end, I am pretty sure this is a bug. As such, I decided to create a Jupyter Notebook describing what I found.

August 23, 2023

Today's Progress

Link to Work

External Links

Thoughts

  • It always feels good when you complete a project! Today was wrapping up with some SMS work via the Twilio API and a new class to manage the notifications with. I ran into a couple small hiccups when no flights were being returned for certain cities, but I was able to come up with a solution to fix that. If you do not succeed the first time, then try and try again, except...
  • Something that is not a part of this, but that I did work on, was creating a script to create PostgreSQL databases and working with them. It was actually really simple to do, once I found the right Python package to install. The documentation for it was quite good, so I had the database created, data flowing into it, and queries being made on it in no time!

August 22, 2023

Today's Progress

Link to Work

External Links

Thoughts

  • Today was all about actually searching for the actual flights, collecting and parsing that data, then presenting the information we want to know. You could very easily spend hours (do not ask how I know) just playing with the API. There are so many different variables at play here, so figuring out just the right ones without limiting yourself too much (or too little) is a careful balance. I am sure I will be updating this extensively, and I will probably be creating my own website to search for flights in the future. Depending on how extensive I get with it, I could even have others I know use it. I mean, I already have the "business" setup on Kiwi, so if I do create the website and have others use it, I will end up getting 3% of the sales when they purchase using the booking link.

August 12, 2023

Today's Progress

Link to Work

External Links

Thoughts

  • What a great capstone project, and it is one that I will actually use! The purpose of this app is to pull in data from a Google Sheet using the Sheety API and determine if flights to the cities in the sheet are found via the Tequila API for less than the thresholds defined per ciy in the sheet. Of course, it is a little more involved than that, as you are actually pulling in data from Tequila to update IATA city codes for the cities on the list, then you end up using that data to look for flights to/from all airports in that city code. I have not got to the latter part of the app yet, though, so for now it does everything else.
  • This was all written using OOP, which you might think is overkill, and in its current form you are absolutely correct. However, this is all just Part 1 of the capstone project. The next part builds on all of this. How? We shall find out in another day or two! Regardless, writing the code using classes was a good way to knock of the cobwebs and get my brain back in that mindset.

August 11, 2023

Today's Progress

Link to Work

External Links

Thoughts

  • The first part of the project I should have replaced with something I am actually interested in, as counting calories (especially getting artificial values for exercises) is such a waste of time. Sure, calorie intake is important, but getting your macros in order is much more important. You can eat a perfect amount of calories every day in chocolate, but if it is all sugar, how does that really benefit you? At the end of the day, this tracker is less useful than just Pixel. If you are going to track exercises, tracking actual workout information (type, weight, reps, sets, etc.) in order to show how you have progressed over time is going to be more beneficial, in my opinion.
  • Not that my little rant is over (sorry!), what I did really enjoy was using Sheety to automatically populate the Google Sheets doc. This is super useful, and I can definitely see using it again in the future. There was one quirk that took me a long while to figure out what was going on, but I got it resolved, and everything is working as intended now. The problem I ran into was a 400 Bad Request when calling the Sheety API. The JSON body was supposed to be "nested in a singular root property named after your sheet." My sheet was called "workouts", as is evident by the endpoint url. Undoubtedly, the root property was not actually supposed to be "workouts", but instead "workout" (without the "s"). I have zero idea why, as that makes zero sense to me, but at the end of the day the why does not really matter, as long as it works. All-in-all, I will definitely be using Sheety again.
  • The only additional part to this project was throwing it up in Replit to run from wherever, which actually required a code change. Because the timezone of their servers are UTC, I had to add in a new library that would convert the timezone to the proper one. Nothing major, but it was another good library that I have not used before but very likely will need again in the future.

August 10, 2023

Today's Progress

  • Completed Pixela Stopwatch Slack App

Link to Work

External Links

Thoughts

  • Turns out the timer I created yesterday did not work as I thought it would, but that is also partially my fault. I noticed that whenever I used the slash command I created in Slack, it never actually started or stopped a stopwatch. It only ever incremented the quantity by one. After looking into it, I realized that I was just following the basic webhook creation, which used the type of "increment". The stopwatch webhook actually required the type of, you guessed it, "stopwatch".

    Before going through the process of editing and redeploying the app in Slack, I decided it was better to just update my habit tracker code by adding in functions for the stopwatch webhook creation and starting/stopping the stopwatch. I started with the easier piece, which was the latter. You can start and stop the stopwatch without the webhook, if you just use the token, which is what the rest of the code uses. Because fo this, implementing that was a piece of cake, and I was able to start the stopwatch without issue. I even noticed that the return text literally says "Stopwatch start successful", which I have never seen before, so that verifies that this was a much greater success than before!

    The webhook creation function should have been just as easy, but I ran into a JSON serialization error that just made no sense to me because I was doing everything exactly the same as other functions I have created and were working just fine. After fumbling with it for way, way, way too long, I finally realized what the issue was. The value for "graphID" was using curly brackets around the variable (I had just copied and pasted that part of the URL string), which meant the interpreter was thinking the variable was a key in another dictionary, which clearly had no value so was malformed. Once I noticed that, I immediately removed them, and voila! Worked like a charm.

    Now that the code update was finished and I had my new stopwatch webhook hash string, I edited and redeployed the Slack app. I tested the slash command, and it stopped the stopwatch and added the appropriate amount of minutes to the quantity for today's pixel. Very nice!

August 9, 2023

Today's Progress

Link to Work

External Links

Thoughts

  • So far there is nothing crazy about this project, just more API calls. I did not get terribly far into it today, though. That is mainly due to the fact that I ended up creating a webhook in Slack for the Pixela Stopwatch! Now I can see exactly how long I am coding for. No more guessing!

August 8, 2023

Today's Progress

Link to Work

External Links

Thoughts

  • I never really thought about the pixel graph on my GitHub page as being a "habit" tracker, but it most definitely is. Now whether they made it first, or Pixela did and GitHub just thought it was a great idea and implemented it, is something I am curious about. Either way, implementing my own version of it is pretty cool. Naturally, though, just doing the minimum amount of work was not enough for me. Having a bunch of commented out code that you then need to uncomment specific sections to use it is just messy and a nightmare to work with. So what did I do? Make it user-friendly, of course! There is more I could add, and I probably will do so, but converting everything into functions, having it prompt the user for actions and inputs, and having it loop until the user is done making changes is really nice.
  • In looking further at the documentation, I see that there is a stopwatch API, as well, which will start the stopwatch on the first request. The second request will stop the stopwatch, as well as update that day's pixel. What is really neat is the fact that when it updates, it actually adds to the existing value for that day. This is really nice and much better than having to manually add the values together and update the pixel accordingly. I will probably work on this functionality tomorrow, so I can keep track of just how much time I am actually spending on these projects. My guess is way more than I really have time for.

August 7, 2023

Today's Progress

Link to Work

External Links

Thoughts

  • Although the stock market does not really interest me, I found the API for acquiring news articles kind of intriguing. I do not necessarily have any use for it at the moment, but the possibilities for querying anything you are interested in are seemingly endless. My dad has been wanting to get into the stock market, though, so this whole app could actually be of use in the near future. I need to look further at the API's documentation, but it would be nice to be able to retrieve stock data for multiple stocks using a single GET call.

August 6, 2023

Today's Progress

Link to Work

External Links

Thoughts

  • This is the first time that I have ever sent SMS messages from a script, so this was a lot of fun to finish. I did not realize how cheap it is, either. A mere $0.0079 per message for the Pay-as-You-Go plan! I am on a free trial with $15.00 worth of credits, where $1.50 of that goes to the number, leaving $13.50 for messages. If you do the math, that is a LOT of messages, so much so that this particular app could notify me that it is raining every single day for 4.5 years before it runs out of credits. That is insane! I think I might be using SMS for more projects in the future. PythonAnywhere is running the script every day at 6:00 AM, but this is the only task that can run on the free plan, so I will either have pay the $5/month to get up to 20 tasks, or I will just need to host my own server. I have a hosting plan already with one domain still available to use, so perhaps I will use that to run cron jobs and web apps. Either way, this was a lot of fun to learn and play with.

August 5, 2023

Today's Progress

Link to Work

External Links

Thoughts

  • Moving at my own pace and not having to be stressed about trying to complete everything in one day has been pretty nice. As you will see in the code, there is not a lot of lines of code, however the time I spent playing with it, analyzing the data returned from the API, and determining which way I ultimately wanted to parse through everything took a good chunk of time. Add to that the fact that the API key was not readily available to use (it took some time to propagate), and then once that was working, it took a similar amount of time for the subscription to activate. Needless to say, I spent a good couple of hours working (playing) on this project, and there is still more to be done. The fact that I am not super stressed about having to come back and finish all of this before the end of the day is pretty nice.
  • Now for my thoughts on the work done today, which is really what you are interested in. Playing with the OpenWeather API was a lot of fun, especially since I am very interested in all things weather (kind of hard not to be when you live in Texas and are constantly watching the sky during tornado season!). I think once this little app is complete, I will be using this API in different projects. The Ventusky app was so interesting that I actually downloaded it onto my phone, as it is really neat. One tool that is going to be really useful for almost every project involving APIs moving forward is going to be the Online JSON Viewer. That is such a slick tool, and I wish that functionality was a plugin I could readily use in PyCharm (or any other IDE for that matter). It made sifting through the massive amount of weather data incredibly easy.

August 4, 2023

Today's Progress

Link to Work

Thoughts

  • My, oh my, has it been a while since I worked on this. Technically, yes, this constitutes the breaking of the simple rules of #100DaysOfCode. Unfortunately, life tends to encroach upon the free time required to dedicate ourselves to a long term, daily commit such as this. I am sure if I did just the basics to get by, I could. However, I am not the kind of person to just "get by". I always take it upon myself to go above and beyond, to do further research, and really understand the core concepts of what I am doing. After all, the spirit of the challenge is to, well, challenge yourself! That means the "code for a minimum one hour a day" really means that I am spending three or four hours a day going into rabbit holes, and that is simply not sustainable.

    Because of this, I am now going to be continuing this challenge at a more relaxed pace. In fact, this challenge is no longer going to be "100 Days of Code", but rather "Complete the 100 Days of Code: The Complete Python Pro Bootcamp for 2023 course". The whole reason for this challenge is to push yourself and learn things you likely would not have otherwise, and that is exactly what the course is doing. My journal entries are likely going to have more days in between them now, or there may just be some small changes that were made because that is all I had time to do that day. And you know what? That is perfectly fine with me. I am still learning, and I am still challenging myself. I am just doing so now without the undue stress that is placed upon you with the daily commitment required by the challenge itself.

    Happy coding, everyone!

January 12, 2023

Today's Progress

Link to Work

Thoughts

  • Having the actual days I have been coding and the day in the course be off has been driving my OCD crazy, so I decided to do an extra lesson today to get it all back on an even kilter. It actually worked out quite well, as Day 33 was very much tied to Day 32 anyway.

  • Day 32 was focused on SMTP, which is definitely a topic I have been wanting to learn about, as that is something I use quite often in my scripts for work. In all of the projects today, it was used in a very simple manner, which is really the best way to learn. I am hoping that it will get more involved by adding in HTML formatting, maybe even some tables, but if not I will just figure out a way to make it happen like I always do.

  • Day 33 was focused on APIs, which is also something I use quite often in my scripts for work, so learning how to use them with Python was great. Combine that with the SMTP work from the previous day, as well as the project being an ISS Overhead Notifier, and you have a very happy man behind this keyboard.

    There was one challenge I had with this project, however it was not due to the APIs. My brain at 10:00 PM (ish) is pretty much mush, and I was having the hardest time trying to create logic to figure out if it is dark or not based on UTC time. Initially, I just went "Okay, if the time is before the sunrise or after the sunset, then it is dark!" Well... Turns out that is not always the case when it comes to UTC because sunset could be 00:00 or later, which means that literally any time after that point would be considered "dark" with the above logic. The solution to this is quite simple, however with my mushy brain, it took me probably 30 minutes to figure it out. The solution? Separate logic for if the sunset is before or after 00:00. If it is after, then the current time must be both before sunrise and after sunset. If sunset is before 00:00, then it can only be one or the other.

January 11, 2023

Today's Progress

Link to Work

Thoughts

  • There is a common theme running through this course, and that is the projects actually being useful, rather than some random project that has no further benefit after writing it. For today, that project was creating a flashcard program. Specifically, this is to learn a new language, but obviously it can be used for whatever you want to learn. The reason this one is so useful for me is I am actually learning German, so I just adapted the program to use German words, and now I am off to the races!
  • This flashcard program was an accumulation of the past few days' topics, so it was a good combination of practice while using the concepts in a slightly different way. There are some things that bug me about it that I have yet to resolve, like why I was unable to remove the border around the button images, but I can always update the code once I come across an answer.

January 10, 2023

Today's Progress

Link to Work

Thoughts

  • The day started off by doing some error handling exercises followed by updating the NATO Alphabet Generator to error handle anything input that is not a letter.
  • The biggest emphasis of the day is ironic because I decided to stop making changes to the Password Manager and move on with the course, only to find that the course has me go work on the Password Manager some more. Win! One thing I really did not like about it, which I do not think I mentioned before, is the fact that the credentials were just being saved in a custom formatted text file, which is not ideal in any situation. As luck would have it, today that converted to JSON. This not only made the formatting of the passwords file much easier to read, it also allowed for the addition of the Search function, which is pretty critical for a password manager.
  • Continuing with the Linux vs Windows element mess, my OCD decided it was best to just have two different versions. The initial design process is done in Linux, and then I run the code in Windows and adjust as needed. This adjustment is saved to a separate file, so no matter which platform you are using, you will have all of the elements in their proper places. The only downside is any changes made to the code now has to be made to two files, so I should probably put in logic that detects the OS and have everything handled accordingly, but for now this will do.

January 9, 2023

Today's Progress

Link to Work

Thoughts

  • The more I worked on the Password Manager, the more I wanted to change things. So that is what I did! Here is a list of changes that I made:

    • Added blank field check
    • Added successful add notification
    • Added copy button to copy generated password
    • Found a way to open the app centered on the screen
    • Updated UI formatting

    Some of these were easy, while others had me searching on how to implement such change. The biggest issue I had was with the copy button. Windows will support emojis, which is how I was adding a clipboard to the button. When I switched to my laptop (Linux) to continue working on this, the clipboard did not appear because it apparently does not support emojis. This had me redesign it to use an image which had to be scaled appropriately in order to fit inside the button.

  • There were a couple of other items I tried to implement, but they did not go as planned and were ultimately abandoned for the time being. An example of one is creating a text pop that hovers over the copy button to simply say "Copy Password". Technically, I got it working. If I hovered over the button, the text displayed. Unfortunately, it brought on an ugly side effect, which was messing up the entire layout for some reason. I vouched to remove it for now, but that is something still on the radar to fix.

January 8, 2023

Today's Progress

Link to Work

Thoughts

  • Another day, another useful project! Today's project was to create a GUI password manager with an integrated password generator. This is going to be a project that I end up packaging and using basically every day at work, mainly for the easy password generator that I can just slap on my desktop. As such, I was definitely invested in this project.

    I am sure I will be tweaking this the more I use it. One major change I know I will be making is how the passwords are stored, as currently that is as plaintext and easily accessible as you can get. This will need to be beefed up by adding the requirement of a password to open the file and encryption to keep wandering fingers and eyes away.

January 7, 2023

Today's Progress

Link to Work

Thoughts

  • The Pomodoro Timer is a project that is something I can actually use, as it sets a clock and runs based on the Pomodoro Technique. The technique, along with screenshots, is shown in the README.md file in the above repo on GitHub. This project is something I am going to take and run with on another project, as pretty much every element in this project can be used for another timer I am wanting to make. Good stuff!

January 6, 2023

Today's Progress

Link to Work

Thoughts

  • It's a... GUI! One of the things that I have really wanted to get into is designing a graphical user interface. I have had a couple of ideas in mind in the past, but I never spent the time to actually learn how to do it. With today's coding, finally got to start that journey of learning how to do it. And now that I have the basics down, I can create essentially whatever basic application's GUI I want.

January 5, 2023

Today's Progress

Link to Work

Thoughts

  • Any day you get to learn something new is a great day, and today was a great day. Up to now, I have only dealt with list comprehensions, but never dictionary comprehensions. I did not even know those existed! And to add a cherry on top, I got to work with pandas DataFrames data using the dictionary comprehension. So all-in-all, it was a great day.

January 4, 2023

Today's Progress

Link to Work

Thoughts

  • The 'Name the States' game was a nice introduction into the pandas module. It combined the CSV parsing with the turtle module to create a game that worked well for both. As always, I think there is a way to improve upon the game, but the current iteration of it definitely works. What I would like to add, though, is a way to click on a state and then see if you answer it correctly.

January 3, 2023

Today's Progress

Link to Work

Thoughts

  • It is ironic that today's work took me back to the snake game because I was thinking about different improvements that could be made. Creating a persistent high score between gaming sessions was not one of them, but it was certainly a good lead into some other ideas I have for different projects. With the reading and writing of files for persistent storage, a lot more options become available, like the small mail merger project in the Replit above for automatically creating personalized invites based on a list of names.

January 2, 2023

Today's Progress

Link to Work

Thoughts

  • The Turtle Crossing Game is the capstone project for all of the turtle module work that has been completed recently. It takes all the bits and pieces from the various games that have been created and put them all into one. Naturally, I had the input lag issue I discussed yesterday, but it was more responsive in this game, so it worked out just fine.

    All in all, creating the game was pretty fun. It is always fun to see how quickly it goes from just a bunch of code with a couple of items on the screen to a fully fleshed out game. One class and two lines of code in the main script took it from just a turtle on the screen to a mass transit highway. Good luck!

  • If you are looking at the code, you may notice an easter egg in there (or two). If you notice it and understand the reference, let me know!

January 1, 2023

Today's Progress

Link to Work

Thoughts

  • Happy New Year!

  • Ironic that I start the new year by coding the classic Pong game. Overall, I really enjoyed making the game. There are certainly limitations to what the turtle module is capable of, though. The way it all works together means that the movement of the paddles is awkward because it is lagging behind your intended movement, so you end up moving way further than expected. When it does that, you are then locked in until that sequence of key presses finishes, meaning the next player is now behind a few cycles and is unfair.

    I am sure there is a way to circumvent this, but it is one of two issues I am having right now that would not be easily addressable. THe other issue is sometimes the ball gets "stuck" inside the paddle, bounces back and forth inside of it a few times, and then it will eventually zoom out because of the dynamic ball speed. I could eventually figure this out, however it is going to take much more time than I currently have available to work on it, especially considering the game is complete otherwise.

    There is one other tiny issue that could be quick to fix, which is the paddles are currently able to move past the walls of the game. This really would not be as big of an issue if the first issue above was resolved, however, because if the paddle moved and stopped when you expected it to, you would never intentionally move it past the walls.

December 31, 2022

Today's Progress

Link to Work

Thoughts

  • To finish the snake game, there was still a bit of work to be done. In total, I added a food and scoreboard class, updated the snake class to be able to extend the snake by a segment when it eats an ap=le, and ; updated the main script to include all these changes, as well as add the game over conditions. Overall, the game works just as it should. The only thing that bugs me is the placement of the apple is not always centered on the snake, so it is a bit awkward at times, but it still works. This is something that can be improved upon in the future, though. See you all in the new year!

December 30, 2022

Today's Progress

Link to Work

Thoughts

  • Ah, the infamous Snake Game from my old Nokia past. What nostalgia! Today was focused on getting the basics completed: the screen, creating the snake, making the snake move, user input to change the snake's direction, and doing so using OOP. Using OOP in the various ways that I have during this course has really helped my brain get more used to it because the reason behind using it actually makes a lot of sense in comparison to how I initially learned it which was just the same old "This is a blueprint of a car. Now our car has wheels, a color, etc.". The snake game is really making it click more because it is something I have been thinking about doing anyway. Not the snake game itself, per se, but making a game period.

December 29, 2022

Today's Progress

Link to Work

Thoughts

  • Turtles. Turtles everywhere! Continuing with the turtle module, there were two different projects completed today.
  • The first project was to create an Etch-A-Sketch, which ended up being much simpler than I was anticipating. When you actually think about it, the mechanics are ridiculously easy: move forward/backward and rotate your heading.
  • This was followed by creating a turtle race, where you have a set of turtles line up at the starting line, you make a bet on who will win, they move forward at random intervals until one of them crosses the finish line, then you get told if you won or lost. Naturally, I took it upon myself to make this more advanced than it really need to be by autoscaling the turtle size, starting y positions, and the finish line based on the sizes chosen for the screen width and height. What can I say? I am a stickler for improving things.

December 28, 2022

Today's Progress

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Thoughts

  • Today was an interesting day. I got to further my dumbfoundness for contemporary art because it just makes zero sense as to why these pieces sell for so much money. In this case, it is the dot painting by Damien Hirst. It is literally just randomly colored dots organized in a grid. One of them even sold for over 19 MILLION DOLLARS!! So incredibly ridiculous...

    At any rate, today's project was to create one of these paintings by extracting colors from an image and then creating the "painting" via the turtle module. Pretty fun little project that had me use a new module I have never touched, as well as use some more of the turtle module that I have never used before.

December 27, 2022

Today's Progress

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Thoughts

  • As you can see, I took a nice little break to spend 100% of my time with the family. I think we can all agree that is completely within the rules. Now back to business!

    I enjoy the fact that this course did not just introduce OOP and then move on to the next thing. It actually continued using it with a whole new project, which was nice. Creating the Trivia Game was another good round of practice with writing OOP, and although the game is technically complete per the course requirements, I have more I want to add to it (specifically working with APIs to pull the trivia data). In fact, I even created a "next_step.py" file containing some of the changes I have already started working on, and I updated the README.md file to specify that more work is to be done on it.

December 23, 2022

Today's Progress

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Thoughts

  • Today was a good day for the course. It has now progressed to OOP, which is honestly one of my weaker points of programming. I understand the concept, and I can write and use the classes no problem, but my brain does not always think in OOP when creating a script. This is admittedly due to not having a lot of practice with it, as the vast majority of the scripts I have written over the years are written in PowerShell and are either single task scripts or scripts that iterate through CSVs to perform various tasks based on the data within them. So even though today's exercise was just a conversion of the coffee machine code, it was definitely good practice.

December 22, 2022

Today's Progress

Link to Work

Thoughts

  • Making a coffee machine was a neat little exercise. I had never really thought about making a vending machine style program before, so it was good for my brain to get that experience in.

December 21, 2022

Today's Progress

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Thoughts

  • This was the last lesson labelled as "beginner", so I am excited to finally move past this section. This project was another higher/lower game, just with a twist. Overall, it was still a very simplistic game, though. In fact, I ended up writing the game in half of the lines of code that as the solution code had, as they had made it far more difficult than it needed to be by adding in functions that would never be used more than once. I mean, I get it. They want to showcase everything that has been learned up to this point, but it was truly unnecessary in my opinion.

December 20, 2022

Today's Progress

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Thoughts

  • Funny enough, Day 12's project was labelled as the "final project", which was significantly more simplistic than making the Blackjack game. Or maybe it was only more simplistic because I took the Blackjack game too far past what was intended, even though there are still improvements I want to make the game? Either way, Day 12 has been completed.
  • Day 13 was all about debugging, which was really no more debugging than has already been performed throughout this course's exercises anyway. Thankfully, since I took so long on the Blackjack game, this allowed me to complete two "days" in one day, so I am now all caught up!

December 19, 2022

Today's Progress

Link to Work

Thoughts

  • Per usual, I took a bit longer on this than anticipated. This is because I get really into making sure everything is working one hundred percent as intended. With this, I add debugging, see what is actually happening (even if the result is correct, is it actually getting that result in the intended way?), move code around, clean code up, etc.

    There is definitely still work that can be done to make the code much cleaner, and I have already added in extra art to make the user experience that much better in the next version of the game, but for the sake of moving forward with the course I am calling it done for the time being. I may still work on it on the side, but it will definitely be lower priority than anything else until I complete the course.

December 18, 2022

Today's Progress

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Thoughts

  • Today was working on the first capstone of the course: Blackjack. I did not get nearly as much completed as I wanted to, so I will have to pick it back up tomorrow and play catch up.

December 17, 2022

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Thoughts

  • This was the first time I was tasked with making a calculator. Although it was simplistic, as the arithmetic is built-in to Python already, it is always nice to create something that is actually useful.

December 16, 2022

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  • Today's part of the course was definitely only geared towards learning a building block of Python, one that I am definitely familiar with. As such, there was nothing for me to learn today. But of course, it is always good to get some practice in to keep it fresh in your mind.

December 15, 2022

Today's Progress

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Thoughts

  • Sadly, there was nothing new with today's work, as I have already created Caesar Cipher scripts before. However, it was a good refresher on the topic.

December 14, 2022

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Link to Work

Thoughts

  • Yet another fun little game, and one that we are all very familiar with: Hangman. This was a nice exercise to really get my brain back up and running, as it allowed me to think about how to accomplish certain things in ways I have not used in a while. For example, the clearing of the screen to refresh the content, as well as when and how to display certain content in relation to that clear. My kiddos have really been loving Hangman the last few weeks, so this will be something nice to show them and play over the upcoming Christmas break.

December 13, 2022

Today's Progress

Link to Work

Thoughts

  • I always love games, so adding Reeborg's World to the course was fun. I had actually never seen a "jumping hurdles" or "maze" challenge before, so although easy to solve, it was still much more enjoyable than your usual while loop exercises. This is something I will probably end up showing to the kids when they want to move on from blockly and start learning Python.

December 12, 2022

Today's Progress

Link to Work

Thoughts

  • Today's project was actually a pretty beneficial one, as it is something I use on a regular basis for my job: A Password Generator. The general creation of the tool may not have been very complex, however I did end up searching for and finding a new method I have never used before: Shuffle. I have never had a need to shuffle a list before, so it was pretty nifty to learn something new. I am definitely going to continue to refine this password generator and cater it towards my exact needs.

December 11, 2022

Today's Progress

Link to Work

Thoughts

  • Creating the Rock Paper Scissors game was a bit more fun using the actual representation of the hand gesture in the console. I think the logic could use some cleaning up, as I used hard coded evaluations which would not scale well if there were more than three choices, so I may work on that later. The trick to this, though, would be simplifying the logic while also maintaining the detailed results of the game. For now, though, the game is fully functional and a fun way to kill a minute or two.

December 10, 2022

Today's Progress

Link to Work

Thoughts

  • The project for today might have been a simplistic one, but it was definitely fun and got the creative juices flowing. It was a Choose Your Own Adventure game called Treasure Island. If you want to take a peek at it, just head hit the Replit link above and take a look at the treasure-island.py file.

December 9, 2022

Today's Progress

Link to Work

Thoughts

  • Although this course is still in the very basics, I have decided to just go through the motions, as there may be a piece of information I did not know or a trick that I might learn. Either way, Day 2 complete!

December 8, 2022

Today's Progress

Link to Work

Thoughts

  • Today I made the decision to challenge myself with another 100DaysOfCode challenge! It has been about a year since I last really touched Python, as I have been primarily coding with PowerShell, and I want to ensure I do not get rusty. I want my main focus to be more on topics I do not have much experience in with Python, specifically: APIs, creating applications and websites, scraping, etc. With my currently hectic schedule, I do not want to spend a lot of time researching how to do things. As such, I set out to find pre-designed content that would allow me to push my knowledge and complete my goal.

    Luckily, I found 100 Days of Code: The Complete Python Pro Bootcamp for 2023 , which appears to be just what I am looking for. Although I took the assessment and was told to start a third of the way in, I have decided to just go through the entire course as is, since there are projects that I would miss out on. And who knows, I might learn something new about a "basic" concept! That has certainly happened to me in the recent past, so maybe I will find some new trick I have never seen before.

    Here's to 100 Days of Python!