Tag Archives: coding

Helping ‘mini me’ learn and practice Python coding

21 Thursday Apr 2022

Posted by in development, General, Technology

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My eldest son is studying computer science at school. As part of that course, like most educational settings they’re using Python to teach programming skills. Having sat with my son to help him get to grips with the coding the different ways of looping, implementing conditions, variable scopes and so on it has been interesting to see that school student level programming books take developers through very very simple steps with the rewards of success immediate but of limited value.

The challenge and concern, with this, is the step from this to delivering something meaningful, that continues to provide a sense of reward, while also something that is closer to real-world work.

This is where a small project I had comes into play. I have for many years been using an app called Orange CD catalog to record all the details of my music collection. The only problem is that it is a thick desktop app and the web solution called Racks and Tags hasn’t seen much development from what I can see for a long time and by current user experience looks archaic. As you may have guessed our pet project is to provide a web interface for the exported data from the Orange CD catalog. You can see the code in my GitHub repo here). I’ve carefully structured the code so the logic of processing the data (i.e. loops and conditions using data structures – using Python’s XMLTree library, which behaves a lot like lists – helping with basic learning). The web serving tier is implemented with Flask using simple annotations. This provides a nice opportunity to talk about the use of HTTP. The Jinja templates are also kept separate, so we don’t get bogged down with HTML, which can be a bit messy (IMHO).

Orange CD Catalogue

We’ll deploy the solution to our little Raspberry Pi, so it can be used anywhere in our network. Ultimately we could use it to stream the albums I’ve ripped to MP3. If my son wants/needs to learn a little bit about databases – then migrating the data into something like SQLLite becomes a simple development opportunity.

This does mean some prep work and including part of the solution, so something works very quickly. For me that’s fine, my Python web skills could benefit from some work and Jinja2 is new to me. But I could take the project embed suitable security and deploy it to my free Oracle cloud instance as a container into K8s. Those bits I won’t be sharing (minimize the risk of someone wanting to test how well I patch code etc).

Feel free to take the code and use it for yourself, extend, etc. But you don’t have to use my idea. The important thing is the idea is going to interest your child. But keep it simple. for example, if your child is a gamer, then perhaps you generate a simple data extract from the gaming servers to capture player performance, then your app does simple things like searching the content, sorting it, and providing a vanilla UI. The secret I think is each bit of the project is simple steps and not over well with heaps of code. Provide results quickly for example just search for an album by its title, and get the results into a webpage quickly.

No documentation – a coding error?

01 Friday Dec 2017

Posted by in development, General, Oracle

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I came across this tweet from Oracle Developers (Oracle Developers Tweet) which picked up on a post from the NoBugsProject about common errors with the use of exceptions. One of the first errors the article described is one of my pet hates – the use of standard exceptions for application specific errors.

This took me onto one of my other pet hates – code without any documentation. I’m not advocating the days of waterfall Development where reams of documentation had to be produced before a single line of Code was written. In fact this is in my option worse than nothing as the docs would often not match the coded reality. But I absolutely agree with the agile manifesto statement:

We value working code over documentation

This doesn’t say no documentation, despite the fact that I have encountered more times than I care to recall the use of this statement to justify not documenting code. So what is the right balance?

We want to save effort from Code reviews and get clean code by using static code analysis but it doesn’t have the ability to apply smarts as what needs documenting? Pair programming is rarely practised, and there is plenty of psychology about group behaviour that can undermine documentation in a pair working approach effort. So what is the answer?

Well, I’ve always applied a couple of personal rules of thumb that can be measured with static code analysis particularly if you use conventional documentation tags. The rules are:

  • Interfaces warrant an interface level description of the interface purpose. It’s always helpful to describe/illustrate with use example. This is code equivalent to a good API Blueprint or swagger doc.
  • Provide a class level description of what the class is for – if it is a DAO then just say what the entity is.
  • If a class is part of a pattern, name the pattern. This is most important when relating to supporting a composite or solution pattern. Remember there will always situations where a newbie will get asked to extend or change your code, help them. Remember not every developer is as experienced or clever as you. If in doubt, give your code to someone who doesn’t know what you’re working on and ask them to explain what your code is doing and why. I had once, had to create a JDBC abstraction layer as we needed to support multiple databases. But if you know JDBC you’ll be aware of there are some subtle but important differences in implementation of connectors. I took the time to explain it in the interface header. I know a couple of developers appreciated the investment of 5 minutes.
  • If you have a function that has a code analytics score such as cyclometeric then describe the function. Use the comment to convey why the high score is justifiable.
  • If the code has specific dependencies or has to perform in a very specific sequence a short comment will help, and anyone going through refactoring code.

With these guidelines it becomes possible to then use javadoc tools to generate your documentation. It doesn’t require you to go find a word document or a wiki page to update the documentation. Of course then reviewing the generated documentation will soon help you finesse the process of documenting in a manner that is whilst light also supports readability without needing the code.

For those, who still disagree I would say …

  • Do you want to be maintaining and updating the same code for the rest of your career to meet new minor changes etc?
  • Not everyone is a great coder like you, do you want someone less capable who may have to make a change messing up your elegant code?
  • Sooner or later someone will ask you to fix or enhance some code that in your eyes is a chaotic unintelligible mess, I’m sure you’d appreciate some comments that will help you understand what the developer was trying to do? We can’t expect those not so good at the craft to document if the best of us are not prepared to do so.

If you don’t agree, or have found different approaches that ensure enough accurate documentation, please share.