PyBloom coding project: Conclusions

Conclusions

This project has been quite a learning experience. I’ve had to get to grips with a lot of technologies, a lot of frameworks, and quite a learning curve. Here are some top tips:

• No matter how clear the tutorials, the code never works first time. Learn by testing.

• Google and YouTube are great resources for finding how to do things, but relies on being able to ask the right question. Be clear on precisely what the problem is.

• Having to describe everything here has really helped reinforce the learnings. 

• There’s always another feature to think up and implement. But it’s important to be clear when done=done, and the program is good enough to be used.

• Good enough to be used by you isn’t the same as good enough for someone else. If you want to roll out the program, have it tested by someone that doesn’t know it.

Even better if…

Over the course of this document, I’ve described how I’ve implemented the features of my program. It’s doing what I intended it to do, the lights are showing how the evenings are getting colder. It’s fine for personal consumption, but it wouldn’t be fine for others to use. Before going into new features, I should look at operationalising the code, which will be a whole different set of challenges:

• The program should be available (to an acceptable service level), which means it should be deployed onto a hosted site. 

• I’ve done precious little formal testing. At least, operationalised code should have a testing approach consisting of: test data, test cases, expected results. At best, these tests should be completed automatically, as the code is promoted from dev to prod. This is the basis of continuous deployment.

• Operational tools: manual CRUD access to the databases - because I built in a way of manually adding data, but didn’t build a way to remove it.

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Thank you for joining me on this journey. Hope it’s been a little help with your own exploration. Also visit https://github.com/Schmoiger/pybloom for the full story.