HPR3656: Importance of Small toy projects

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

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Podcasts
http://www.thelinuxlink.net
http://freeculturepodcasts.org

How it works - Checking the feeds

feed_info.py
loop through feeds
use feedparser to 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