Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am taking all my progress so far and discarding it. A lot has happened, yet not much at all. Let’s get started!
The past several weeks have been covered by me getting so far ahead on my Minecraft server, now called Button Mash. I managed to maintain a backlog of completed posts, but for reasons I will get into, I’ve run out, so here I am, “live” again.
This project has undergone a major overhaul in concept. Instead of a ready built solution, I will be facing material in a class I was unable to complete due to incompatibilities with the physical classroom environment; I will be building my site from scratch.
So far, it doesn’t look like it will be as bad as I thought it would be at first. I am going through the Flask Megatutorial by Miguel Grinburg [Link to first lesson]. As of this writing, I am on part 4 of 23. Yeah, I’m going to be at this for a while as I build up my skill set. Unfortunately, I doubt anyone would have fun reading half a dozen blog posts about following tutorials week after week, and I would get bored trying to keep them interesting. So, without much else I can do to keep things interesting, I think this project will be more of a monthly feature until I finish the tutorial. Don’t worry, there will be plenty of other aspects of the project to cover.
My main focus this week is covering the tutorial. I really do need to take it slowly, one lesson at a time until I finish the little “Microblog” project being built and I probably won’t ever deploy anywhere. The process of copying everything reminds me of when I learned Lua. One of the best ways to learn a language is to transcribe a complex, known working program.
The tutorial assumes you are using the command line, but I am using the Pro version of Pycharm. Incidentally, whenever the tutorial gives me step by step instructions for working with the command line, I need to stop and evaluate it for the IDE (Integrated Development Environment).
One of my earliest problems involved trying to get Microblog to work with Flask. That task was trivial, as there’s an option for it in the new project window.
Another, more difficult task was getting Microblog to run when I went to test it for one of the first times. It had two hard-coded URL’s to use, but only one was in seemingly in use. I ended up deleting a default “Hello World” file that was giving the false success. With the decoy out of the way, everything stopped working. The proper files under development were moved to where they actually belonged.
One of the things I did to make it work was a mistake. I don’t know why it worked or why it broke, but whatever I did, I addressed it properly later on, and only just recently cleaned up the mess I made when trying to revert a very early change.
All of my stubborn problems so far have been with the terminal/API differences. At one point, I misunderstood how things were supposed to be arranged. At another, I was unable to read the filesystem correctly, so I actually moved a few files where they should have been. Naturally, Microblog lost track of where they were.
Final Question: What is your favorite or most effective way to learn a programming language?