Diddy's coding journey

[Diddums 4,305]

Best start a new thread then. This is more of a journal of what I'm doing, what I want to do, any challenges and stuff along the way. If it helps someone then great 🙂

 

First off, I absolutely loved it. It felt so good to be coding again, I forgot how much I enjoyed doing it, even if it's been 25 years or so since I last did anything.

 

So after spending a few hours this weekend coding and fiddling, I now have a very basic COVID statistics tracker and a very basic weather app. The reason I did this is because I just can't stomach a full 8 hour lesson to have a simple bit of text saying "hello world" at the end as that's always been where I've lost interest in the past. I wanted something that although pretty much useless, is an actual piece of software that works, and also provides real time information. For this I had to use API calls. So I set my sights a bit higher and went for it. All I can say is that it's piss. It's really so much easier than I'd have anticipated, what would've been a 500 page project before was done with no more than a single page of code. The tools nowadays are so much easier too, making it a lot easier than I'd have anticipated.

 

I'm shuffling things around a bit in order of what I would say is the easiest, then the most difficult, in case anyone else wants to have a go. If you're keen, then follow this guide:

 

1: Download Python from their website.

2: Download PyCharm. This will be your code writing software.

3: Start writing code! This COVID tracker is extremely basic and simple to make, you can have this up and running in an hour or less:

 

 

If you have problems running the code with something about the requests package not being installed, then simply right click on the word "requests" in the code, click on "context options" or something similar, then "install requests package". Try again. Took me a little while to figure out, I installed the requests package on my PC which didn't work, until I realised that PyCharm is a closed working environment when testing, so it has to be installed inside Pycharm. 

 

4: If you've got all that up and running and want to try a new project, then sign up to Openweathermap.org. Do this first as there's a two hour delay after signing up until you can actually use their facilities.

 

Then follow this video:

 

 

 

IMPORTANT: Since the vid was made, a few things have changed in how the API calls work. These will be in the API URL, most notably where it'd say "London" before, it'll now say "London,uk" - small little things like that will drive you nuts.

 

I'll post up anything else in here, but this is a fantastic little side hobby. Even if you just spend an hour doing the COVID thing to see if it's for you or not, it's worth it. 

 

[phil bottle 9,567]

Brilliant stuff Dave❤

[GazzaGarratt 10,867]

This is a great help to start off with. I need to find a few hours to sit and do the first elements. What would be helpful is at some point someone could explain why certain options are selected. For instance at the start of that first video he starts of going to Terminal and writing stuff in it but no explanation as to why he's doing that. What is Terminal used for? Why does he select those random names to type in in the terminal box? I can copy someone but I won't be able to do my own if i don't understand what its used for if you get what I mean.

 

Looking forward to seeing what you make @Diddums!