hpr3656 :: Importance of Small toy projects
Toy projects are a great way to learn a new language, and a project I did just for fun.
Hosted by norrist on Monday, 2022-08-08 is flagged as Clean and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.
python, programming.
1.
The show is available on the Internet Archive at: https://archive.org/details/hpr3656
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Duration: 00:19:09
general.
Importance of Small toy projects
Inspired by
- https://talkpython.fm/episodes/transcript/327/little-automation-tools-in-python
- Automating little things
- hpr3558 :: How I'm learning Haskell
- The Host talks about learning Haskell and says something like
- Finishing a small project is better than Starting a big project and not completing it.
- And You can not learn to code by reading, you need practice
My recommendation for learning a new language.
- Think about a small problem you want to solve with code.
- Start banging away at it.
- Redo over and over, its OK
- Same project but better
- Learn new tech and practice
An example of one of my small projects
- Original intent of my podfaded project
- Mostly Tech/Linux podcasts
- Find every podcast I could
- Track release cadence
- Rate how podfaded the feed is
- Use search API to find RSS feeds
First attempt plan
- Scrape podcast networks
- used beautiful soup - something I wanted to learn anyway
- HTML
- Jinja templating - something I wanted to learn anyway
- Bootstrap - something I wanted to learn anyway
- Different colors based on how podfaded
First attempt problems
- individual script per network
- 4-5 different scripts
- took forever to run
- Broke when networks changed their page layout
Redo
- Test Driven Development and pytest
- Red Green Refactor
- Confidence to change code
- Simplify - one scrapper script
- Embed audio player for latest episode
How it works - Scraping pages for feeds
scrape_for_feeds.py- Provide a list of websites that have lists of podcasts
- Search the page for any links
- Check if the feed is valid by trying to parse it with
feedparser - Add feed to database
Podcasts pages I scrape
How it works - Checking the feeds
feed_info.py- loop through feeds
- use
feedparserto find latest episode- title and enclosure (audio file)
HTML Output
- https://podfaded.norrist.xyz/
- Currently hosted on a Free Tier VPS
- No Promises it will be there forever
Feedback Welcome
- https://gitlab.com/norrist/podfaded2
- Bugs
- Sometimes the title is missing, so some of the CSS coloring doesn't work
- Excluded podcasts still occasionally show up on the list
- Looking for more curated lists of podcast pages
- not search sites
- Maybe scrape HPR podcast recommendation episodes
Example
