Importance of Small toy projects

Inspired by

https://talkpython.fm/episodes/transcript/327/little-automation-tools-in-python

Automating little things

hpr3558 :: How I'm learning Haskell

The Host talks about learning Haskell and says something like

Finishing a small project is better than Starting a big project and not completing it.

And You can not learn to code by reading, you need practice

My recommendation for learning a new language.

Think about a small problem you want to solve with code.

Start banging away at it.

Redo over and over, its OK

Same project but better

Learn new tech and practice

An example of one of my small projects

Original intent of my podfaded project

Mostly Tech/Linux podcasts

Find every podcast I could

Track release cadence

Rate how podfaded the feed is

Use search API to find RSS feeds

First attempt plan

Scrape podcast networks

used beautiful soup - something I wanted to learn anyway

HTML

Jinja templating - something I wanted to learn anyway

Bootstrap - something I wanted to learn anyway

Different colors based on how podfaded

First attempt problems

individual script per network

4-5 different scripts

took forever to run

Broke when networks changed their page layout

Redo

Test Driven Development and pytest

Red Green Refactor

Confidence to change code

Simplify - one scrapper script

Embed audio player for latest episode

How it works - Scraping pages for feeds

scrape_for_feeds.py

Provide a list of websites that have lists of podcasts

Search the page for any links

Check if the feed is valid by trying to parse it with feedparser

Add feed to database

Podcasts pages I scrape

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Podcasts

http://www.thelinuxlink.net

http://freeculturepodcasts.org

How it works - Checking the feeds

feed_info.py

loop through feeds

use feedparser to find latest episode

title and enclosure (audio file)

HTML Output

https://podfaded.norrist.xyz/

Currently hosted on a Free Tier VPS

No Promises it will be there forever

Feedback Welcome

https://gitlab.com/norrist/podfaded2

Bugs

Sometimes the title is missing, so some of the CSS coloring doesn't work

Excluded podcasts still occasionally show up on the list

Looking for more curated lists of podcast pages

not search sites

Maybe scrape HPR podcast recommendation episodes

Example