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Phil (aka MP3Monster)'s Blog

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Phil (aka MP3Monster)'s Blog

Tag Archives: learning

Helping ‘mini me’ learn and practice Python coding

21 Thursday Apr 2022

Posted by mp3monster in development, General, Technology

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Tags

children, coding, education, Flask, learning, Music, OrangeCD Catalog, programming, python, STEM

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.

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Learning Ansible Review Part 3

08 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by mp3monster in Book Reviews, Books, Packt, Technology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Ansible, book, ebook, error, learning, Packt, publishing, python, reporting, review, rollback

Chapters 4 & 5 of Packt’s Learning Ansible continue to build out strategies needed for enterprise class deployment and configuration management, for example error handling, rollback and reporting in chapter 4.  As chapter, the amount of new Ansible capabilities being introduced is not as substantive as prior chapters, and emphasis is more only what could be described as best practise. For example creating Playbooks that have the means to be invoked to re-establish a prior state if the the execution of the current playbook was to throw up an error.  The callback explanation does need a bit more understanding of how Python works as implementing a callback involves a little bit of Python coding, but the points into which you can hook actions is very rich.

From knowing how to trap callbacks it becomes possible to initiate notifications when events occur in playbooks which is where this chapter moves onto with monitoring and alerting. This really focuses on has my playbook executed as expected and reporting back through means such as email, nagios and graphite.  The examples with email and nagios miss a trick, although the text says you can incorporate output from tasks – it isn’t illustrated; yet if something falters you’d want to see the task output.

Chapter 5 goes into how you might write your own custom modules and test them. Ansible will support any language that is available in your target environment, although Python is the recommended language given its general availability and is the language used to write Ansible, and Ansible modules can be leveraged to shorten the effort in creating custom modules. The chapter then walks through examples using Python, Bash shell scripting and Ruby. A lot of the work appears to be centred on extracting the appropriate parameters to allow the module to run with. The final part of the chapter looks at testing with the Python Nose library.

Solid chapters, and perhaps a little shorter than the first few, but importantly continuing to be well written although perhaps a couple of small missed opportunities to be great chapters.

Prior chapter reviews:

  • Learning Ansible Part 2
  • Learning Ansible Part 1

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