Python Black Belt and Project Week - Week 6 Monday

Hello! It's Monday of 6th Week, and we've just taken our Python Black Belt exam. 4.5 hours, starting at 9 AM. I didn't get any work done over the weekend, contrary to the previous post. However, I did get login and registration done, so that made the first part of the black belt more painless. I won't spoil the exam for future cohorts, but it involves building on simple login and registration and adding new features, akin to 'The Wall' assignment. There were a couple of things I failed to implement from the wireframe given, but for the most part, the website performs pretty close to the wireframe expectations. I just hope they don't expect it to look exactly like the wireframe given, because it doesn't. But all the content is there. Hopefully I'll be able to scrape enough points up to get a red belt?

Moving forward, project week starts tomorrow, where we'll take everything we've learned so far in the Python stack and combine it with APIs to (hopefully) create an awesome web app. We've got some ideas floating our group right now and we'll pick something to work with tomorrow. Updates to come!

Deployment frustrations!

This week we got started with Pylot, a MVC framework built on Flask. It's pretty lightweight, and basically takes the Flask framework and splits it into the traditional model-view-controller architecture. Essentially all we do is split our Pylot files and link it back together, or compartmentalize our application for scalability/organization. At the end of the week, we started with deploying to Amazon EC2, which brought about its own raft of problems. The most common problem I've experienced thus far is the 502 Bad Gateway thrown by nginx. It's frustrating to follow all the instructions to a T and still get an error. I troubleshooted and was able to deploy by Friday night, but after attempting it again today (Saturday), I got the same error. I'm taking this as a good stopping point (for now) and will try again later. However, this is all a learning experience and repeating the steps multiple times only helps reinforce my understanding of exactly what I'm doing, instead of blindly following a tutorial.

I somewhat doubt the usefulness of the Pylot MVC framework, especially considering that it's made in-house (Coding Dojo developed) and Django is the most popular Python web framework, although there's no denying its ease of use and value for teaching the MVC model. For now, I'll take what I can get, since I haven't mastered Pylot completely yet either.

Monday will be our cohort's Python black belt exam. If I'm to earn a black belt, I need to have mastered deployment and Pylot. Earlier in the week I had planned on getting Pylot and deployment done by Friday, but I've fallen behind schedule and plan to spend the rest of the weekend getting ready for the black belt. I've tempered my expectations from receiving a black belt to at least a red belt (8/10 to 9/10 points on the test, black belt is 9/10+), but we can try as many times as there are tests (so 6 or 7?). The black belt requires a successful deployment. Given everyone else's frustrations, I'm glad I'm not alone, and also glad to finally have encountered a problem that took more than a few hours to solve.

Update: Week 4 Python

The time is 2:16 PM, Friday August 9th. I have a package that I'm eager to get to at home, but as much as I want the instant gratification of opening a package that I traded some of my hard-earned money for, coding and solving problems compels me to stay.

This week we began the Python module, starting with Python fundamentals, then moving to the Flask micro-framework web server. Thus began our journey into back-end technologies. No longer are we serving up single webpages, we're actually running a server that stores and cooks up webpage content on demand, as simple as the projects have been. 

It's taken a while to get used to the syntax and structure of Python and especially Flask, but I think I'm getting the hang of it. I'm no longer leading in terms of content done, but that's ok. I also haven't fully completed all of the content so far, electing to skip some more repetitive stuff to keep pace. As of right now, I've completed the Flask section and now returning to finish up MySQL, so that I can tackle the Flask + MySQL section.

It's been a pretty productive week. Maybe I'll revisit my ecowebhosting domain with a new pair of eyes and see how much I understand.