Re: What was the project that made you feel skilled in Python?

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Date	Sat, 25 May 2013 09:17:08 +0100
Subject	Re: What was the project that made you feel skilled in Python?
From	Nicholas Cole <nicholas.cole@gmail.com>
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On Sun, May 19, 2013 at 12:30 PM, Ned Batchelder <ned@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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Re: What was the project that made you feel skilled in Python? Nicholas Cole <nicholas.cole@gmail.com> - 2013-05-25 09:17 +0100

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