What was the project that made you feel skilled in Python?
Nicholas Cole
nicholas.cole at gmail.com
Sat May 25 04:17:08 EDT 2013
On Sun, May 19, 2013 at 12:30 PM, Ned Batchelder <ned at nedbatchelder.com>wrote:
> Hi all, I'm trying to come up with more project ideas for intermediate
> learners, somewhat along the lines of http://bit.ly/intermediate-**
> python-projects <http://bit.ly/intermediate-python-projects> .
>
> So here's a question for people who remember coming up from beginner: as
> you moved from exercises like those in Learn Python the Hard Way, up to
> your own self-guided work on small projects, what project were you working
> on that made you feel independent and skilled? What program first felt
> like your own work rather than an exercise the teacher had assigned?
I had been doing some part-time work on server administration while I was a
graduate student, and had written a python library to help display
user-interfaces for some of the scripts we used internally. At some point,
I discovered that as I had originally written it, I was triggering a small
memory leak, caused by the interaction between python and the underlying
curses c library. In the real world, it would never have mattered, but I
minded very much that the problem existed at all.
To fix the fault required rewriting the whole library from scratch, and I
did the initial version of this while on a long train journey away from
internet access. I could have just left it -- for the scripts we were
running it didn't matter at all -- but it was a matter of pride to write
code that didn't behave badly, even in theory.
I ended up putting the code online, and 8 years and a huge number of public
releases later it still seems to be useful to a few people, and I've
learned an awful lot doing it. I think my proudest "python" moment was
when I first got a bug report from someone I didn't know.
http://code.google.com/p/npyscreen/
Best wishes,
N.
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