We highly recommend doing 100 Days no matter your level. Being aspiring or experienced programmers, you need deliberate practice. A lot of it. We can now assure you that 100Days makes you practice. And with the public commitment it’s also a way to enhance your portfolio. – PyBites
We did it! #100DaysOfCode is done: 5K lines of code, 100 scripts. Just on the day PyBites turns 200 days. In this article we will share our learning on this major project and announce our next 100 days effort …
The Challenge
Last 100 days celebration we rewarded ourselves with a challenge: do the 100 Days of Code Challenge. Today is Day 100 and we confirm: mission accomplished. With busy schedules it was not always easy, but we delivered. More on this in the Retrospective towards the end. First let us break it down …
Stats
Here is our 100DaysOfCode repo.
We wrote roughly 5K lines of code, divided into 100 scripts, one each day:
We auto-tweeted our progress each day which was tracked in our log file.
Our most popular tweets were:
Module Index
We ended up using exactly 100 modules as well (weird coincidence LOL):
pypi : 42 (42.0%)
stdlib : 38 (38.0%)
own : 20 (20.0%)
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Total: 100
You can see the full index of used modules. Here you can pick your module and go directly to the days where we used it.
Find something useful? You can thank us by starring the repo.
See any issue or things we can improve? Fork the repo and make a Pull Request.
Do notice that some scripts are in a pretty basic state. Time was not always on our side. We need a round 2 to do some cleanup. Bear with us …
Showcase of 10 Utilities
Here are some scripts we specially liked:
1. Day 086 – Twitter Archive Stats
Script to pull some quick stats from a #Twitter Archive CSV
(log) Using Counter and csv.Dictreader. Simple exercise, yet useful data. You can run it yourself downloading your Twitter Archive in Settings
(refactored into a package later – see Day 093)
2. Day 014 – Lynda.com new Python course auto-tweeter
Script to automatically tweet out new @lynda (#Python) titles
(log) Feedparser is awesome. Want to run it with filter on Python. Abstracted twitter config away in repo’s common dir (re-use).
We were surprised to find us tweeting out this one yesterday 😉
3. Day 059 – Send an SMS with Twilio
Using the #Twilio #API to send SMS messages
(log) Prework for another app where I want to use Twilio to send reminder notification and text friends 🙂
4. Day 013 – Weather app
A simple #Flask app to compare weather of 2 cities (using OpenWeatherMap #API)
(log) This was a nice follow-up of 012, making it more generic (support any city), using Jinja templating, Flask form handling, and of course a good chunk of timezone handling (for sunset and sunrise)
This led to this article.
5. Day 099 – Flask photo gallery
Simple #Flask app to display photos in a directory
(log) This is a very basic app to demonstrate displaying images using Flask and Jinja templates. All photos need to be stored in the “static” dir within the Flask folder structure. The glob module is used to parse the photo dir. The app can and will be expanded and refactored.
6. Day 003 – Gif image creator
Script to generate a gif from various png/jpg images
(log) Useful for blog, awesome: pip install imageio, cli arg interface is more code 🙂
7. Day 033 – Water reminder app
I need to drink more water at work so I wrote a #Python #script to remind (spam) me every hour
(log) A simple script using MIME and a cron job (read the readme.txt) to remind me to drink more water at work! Doesn’t email on the weekends or before/after hours. Over the top? Maybe. Satisfying? Hell yes.
8. Day 022 – Amazon affiliation link generator
Create and paste #Amazon affiliation link to clipboard #pyperclip @AlSweigart
(log) A nice little utility to copy an take Amazon link from clipboard, convert it into an affiliation link and paste it back to clipboard
9. Day 074 – Making a ecard with Pillow
Using Pillow to add text and opacity to an image = your own cards
(log) Played with the Pillow module. Script to let user enter an image path (or url) and text to put on the image. Pillow does the rest. Could be a useful recipe to make your own Birthday cards 🙂
10. Day 080 – “Is this Bob or Julian?”
“Is this Bob or Julian?” – script to reveal who of @pybites tweets
(log) Fun little exercise that started with Anthony Shaw asking who he was talking to – it actually became more involved turning/testing out location on our tweets and adding exception handling … nice practice! (and a funny new service for our PyBites community)
Bonus Day 009 – as we initiated this post …
Interactive script to create a new Pelican blog article
(log) A lot of known concepts, but nice to bring a lot of functionality together, and above all a really useful script for our blog
As we started this post: HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
Retrospective
As you can see, not only did we get a lot of code written but we had a hell of a lot of fun doing it!
That’s the only way we got to 100 days with our sanity intact. It wasn’t easy in the least: Family, Kids, new jobs, and the usual PyBites responsibilities didn’t leave us with a heap of time but we managed to push and get there in the end. Again, the fun factor is what made it achievable.
Looking back on the 100 days, it’s quite shocking to see how much we accomplished and learned. Julian developed an almost obsessive love affair with Flask (not a hip flask) and Bob created some truly outstanding, fully functional applications.
The challenge also gave us the opportunity to scratch our own itches. Julian was able to create a Steam Games notification service for himself and Bob assigned himself reading goals using Twilio.
While it was insanely tough, the payoff has been huge! We’ve honed our skills, created tools, learned new modules and even developed relationships with other coders – all from participating in the challenge.
We encourage anyone with a love of programming to take the 100 days of code challenge. Dedicating ourselves to a working script every day was a bit on the crazy side though and is by no means a requirement for the challenge. Just remember, anything is better than nothing so give it a crack!
next(PyBites.projects) ?!
Yes, the rumors are true: our next 100 days project will be around learning Django.
We will work incrementally on 2 or 3 projects which we will announce as we go. We will also tailor some articles and code challenges around this effort, so you can learn with us.
This will be a lot of fun and with this major project under our belt, we’re sure that we will learn a thing or two about Django which we hope you can benefit from too.
Stay tuned …
Keep Calm and Code in Python!
— PyBites