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

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Building a Set class (this was before python had them built-in).  Such
exercise stimulates thinking on designing objects that could be part
of the standard library, the questions that arise on API design,
questions on efficiency of implementation.

Then a graph class which can be built from your newly-built set module.

Mark
Tacoma, Washington

On 5/25/13, Nicholas Cole <nicholas.cole@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>


-- 
MarkJ
Tacoma, Washington

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Re: What was the project that made you feel skilled in Python? Mark Janssen <dreamingforward@gmail.com> - 2013-05-25 21:28 -0700

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