Code Challenge 23 – Challenge Estimated Time API – Review

In this article we review last week’s Challenge Estimated Time API. This was a cool challenge and we implemented it using Github’s awesome platform and API.

More than just parsing data

This challenge was two in one:

1. We had to think about how to get data from our challenge takers.

2. We had to code up the processing of this data.

The first point took us a bit of brainstorming, but we stumbled upon Github’s PR template methodology we happily embraced (yeah “Simple is better than complex”).

The cool thing about this is that it puts the template in the comment field when you want to submit a PR:

Of course you can just nuke the template, but we think this is the best we can get: the folks that do PRs are probably in the best position to provide input on these metrics. Secondly if you provide a Google doc a click is an extra step. Doing it this way it’s part of the process you’re already following.

Example of a filled in template in the PR submission:

Github API

For interacting with the Github API we used the PyGithub package which made this pretty easy (although it took some inspection of the various GH API endpoint objects to get to the relevant data).

The code: in challenge_stats.py we get our challenges repo object with get_challenge_repo. From that we parse out the submissions with get_submissions in which we loop through all PRs: for pr in challenge_repo.get_pulls('all').

To get the code challenge number we cannot rely on the PR title. Looking at the PR files we see that they are like: challenge_number/GH_USER/filename (e.g. 23/bbelderbos/challenge_stats.py) so we parse it from there.

In the _parse_template_response helper we parse the new feedback template with the help of some regex. We use a defaultdict(dict) to store user responses per challenge number. The advantages are: we don’t have to initialize keys, and user responses are uniquified this way.

Example

We only just used the template ourselves so we only have one response 🙂

Using pprint we can see the structure of the submissions defaultdict:

$ python challenge_stats.py
defaultdict(,
            {'23': {'bbelderbos': {'completed': True,
                                'difficulty_level': '4',
                                'estimated_time': '2',
                                'i_stretched': True,
                                'other_feedback': 'another test'}}})

That’s where we leave it for now. This will be a handy script to get recorded stats of all PR submissions. When we have enough data, we can write some more code to parse these metrics and show (anonymous) averages on our challenges page.

PR: PyTrack

We got a nice PR from clamytoe (Martin): PyTrack

A simple project/task time tracker for Python 3.

on community branch | original repo

To quote the excellent Readme documentation:

Helps you keep track of how much time you spend on your projects and tasks. A sqlite database is used to track your time logs, and it is kept simple by only implementing as few commands as needed to get a full featured application. You can add/remove multiple projects, start/stop tracking any of them, or completely reset the database to start with a clean slate.

We like how this works as a stopwatch, just stop and start to track a project, and it stores all timings in a DB.

It uses click for command line interface, maya for datetime parsing, and peewee for ORM, check out the code if you want to learn about these packages.

Another nice aspect is that Martin refactored this into a package.

Thanks for joining

Great work is coming out of these challenges, we are humbled and stoked creating our PyBites community this way!

You can start any challenge at any time, just follow our instructions and start coding. Have fun!

Keep Calm and Code in Python!

— Bob and Julian