As I did last year, I’d like to take a look at how well my predictions matched up to what ended up happening:

• Working on my Extra Life Donation Tracker: Yes! I made a bunch of releases last year to fix various bugs for my users. I also finally broke out the Donor Drive Code into its own project so that my code could be used as the basis of non-Extra Life Projects
• Moving Prophecy Practicum to Django: Yes! I did this and my colleague has been using it for about 6 months now. I have some quality of life issues to fix that will help me get better at Django and maybe CSS.
• Redoing flickr views project: Nope. Completely forgot about this.
• Progress on my Unity Game - Eric’s Comet Cleaners - None.
• Learning new programming languages: Yes! Haskell and Go, through Advent of Code problem solving. Also got better at Ruby and Perl.
• Electronics: Some Adaboxes, but no work on my BBQ ThermostatKids: A little more Scratch with the twins. No “real” programming languages with Scarlett.

Compared to last year I had 10 more commits to Github. Pretty consistent!

In these last two months of the year I only worked on Advent of Code.

November

In November I worked through part of the 2016 problem set. I didn’t get too far because of how many languages I was doing at this point. Eventually I decided to allow myself to get a bit further in Python and then catch up with the other languages. Whenever I’d get stuck I’d go back to the other languages. Overall, once I’d figured out Python - Ruby, Perl, and Golang would be pretty easy. Haskell would still be hard, but I started getting the hang of it near the end of the month.

Across both September and October I got a decent amount of programming done. I just about finished the Learn You Haskell for Great Good book (got up to just before Monads) and started Head First Go. Once I had enough Go language to get started on AoC, I knew I’d be ready for the 2016 problem set. Let’s get into the nitty gritty!

Python (not Advent of Code)

Impractical Python

I finished chapter 11 which contained my old friend the Monty Hall Paradox. I’ve had a version up on my site for a very long time based on a PHP tutorial in Linux Format Magazine. This time I was able to code it in Python as well as creating a GUI version. Chapter 11 also touched upon The Birthday Paradox.

Throughout the spring and summer of 2021 a few of the times that I mentioned on the Advent of Code subreddit that I was doing the 2015 problem set in all 3 languages, some folks said they’d be interested in a writeup on the experience. Now that I’ve finally finished 2015 (my first set of 50 stars!) it’s time for that writeup. Before I continue, I’d like to thank everyone on the subreddit who has helped me. I have a README.md for each day’s problem and you’ll find my thanks to those who helped me within those READMEs here in my repo.

I didn’t do much coding in July, so I decided to combine the July and August wrap-ups.

Python

Dreamhost Dynamic DNS

I decided to clean up and update some code that uses the Dreamhost API to allow for Dynamic DNS. I cleaned up the logging output so that I could figure out why it was sometimes deleting one of my domains rather than just updating the IP. The original programmer had it printing out to the terminal. I used the logging package to send logs out to a file. While I was improving the logging, I also decided to use f-strings to make it more obvious what was going into the output string.

June was mostly Python, although I did do chapter 1 of Scratch 3 Games for Kids with Sam. He really, really enjoyed it and I anticipate doing the challenge problems and maybe chapter 2 in July or August.

Books

I read the intro and first couple chapters of both Flask Web Development, 2nd Edition and Data Visualization with Python and Javascript, both from a recent Humble Bundle. The Flask book may be useful for learning more about creating a non-Django site and, even if I mostly stick with FastAPI, it should provide some concepts that are applicable across both frameworks. With the data visualization book, I would love to use that to better visualize my annual Last.fm stats.

Advent of Code 2015 Problem Set

Day 10

There’s a lot to be said for doing the Advent of Code in December along with a few thousand other programmers. It’s fun to be part of something with others and you get to all the neat and wacky solutions that others come up with.

On the other hand, going at my own page with the 2015 problem set allows for interesting little coincidences to form. What I did one day (when I was at about Day 7) was to go through all the remaining days and write some first impression ideas at solutions. This got my brain thinking about what I needed for each day. One day, before getting to the Day 10 problems, I was idly flipping through the book Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! As I was trying to decide if it would be one of the languages I’d add for 2016. I ended up coming across a built-in library that would have made solving Day 10 a real breeze. Day 10 is the Look and Say sequence. I’m sure by paying close attention to that Wiki entry I could have figured out an algorithm. But, basically I just needed to group together each repeated number and then I could take the length of that list/array to find out how many numbers. That becomes part of the new number. Unfortunately, as far as I could see, that functionality was not built into Python. So my Python code looked like this:

I had a lot less variety in my programming month, but still had a lot of fun doing it. In fact, Programming consumed most of my leisure thoughts. More about why I was doing it below, but I’ve been reading Programming Perl as well as skimming through Introducing Go and Learn You A Haskell for Great Good!. Ever since some folks used Haskell during last year’s Advent of Code and this guy’s videos that I mentioned in an early 2021 blog post, I’ve been very curious about the language. In fact, at this point I’ve decided that Go and Haskell will be the next two languages I learn.

A few days ago I read this article over at Tech Republic about how, Mozilla’s greatest achievement is not Firefox, but the Rust programming language. They point to Firefox’s declining numbers in the face of Chrome and Chromium-based browsers and I’m inclined to agree with the author. There is, of course, a kind of poetry to this. Although Netscape was one of the first dot-com companies and beat Microsoft to the punch at creating the first mainstream web browser, it’s not Netscape Navigator which is its greatest legacy. Instead it’s spinning off into Mozilla and, the most poetic part, the creation of the Javascript programming language. (Javascript was written in just a week and a half and this episode of Red Hat’s Commandline Heroes podcast does an excellent job documenting it)

I started off the month thinking it was going to be Python heavy and ended up doing a lot more micro-controller programming. To be fair, I was mostly programming in CircuitPython, but it definitely came out of nowhere.

Python

Civilization VI Webhook in FastAPI

Last month I created a webhook program in Flask to generate notifications when it was someone’s turn in our multiplayer Civilization games. When I posted about it on reddit, someone suggested that I would be better off using FastAPI instead of Flask. I’d been hearing about FastAPI for months on Talk Python to Me and Python Bytes, but I always got the impression that it would only be useful if I was writing my website to be async.