learning Archives - Page 3 of 3

Lessons learned building with Django, Celery, and Pytest

As someone who writes ruby professionally, I recently learned python to build a bot which buys an index of crypto using binance. The best thing about ruby is Rails, so I wanted an excuse to try out Django and see how it compared. Adding multi-user mode to the crypto bot felt like a good enough excuse. My goal was to: Add a model for the user that persisted to a database Cron job to kick off a job for each user, preferably using a job management library Add some tests for primary application flows Docker-compose for the DB and app admin I’ll detail learnings around Docker in a separate post. In this post, I walk through my raw notes as I dug into the django + python ecosystem further…

Building a Crypto Index Bot and Learning Python

A long time ago, I was contracted to build a MacOS application using PyObjc. It was a neat little app that controlled the background music at high-end bars around London. That was the last time I used python (early 2.0 days if I remember properly). Since then, python has become the language of choice for ML/AI/data science and has grown to be the 2nd most popular language. I’ve been wanting to brush up on my python knowledge and explore the language and community. Building a bot to buy a cryptocurrency index was the perfect learning project, especially since there was a bunch of existing code on GitHub doing similar things. You can view the final crypto index bot project here. The notes from this learning project are below…

Building a Elixir & Phoenix Application

Learning Elixir Ever since I ran into Elixir/Phoenix through a couple of popular Hacker News posts I’ve been interested in tinkering with the language. I have a little idea for an app that I’m just motivated enough to build that Elixir would work for. I’ve document my learning process below by logging my thoughts as I learned Elixir via a ‘learning project’. What I’m building Here’s what I’d like to build: Web app which detects the user’s location using the built-in location service in the browser The zip code of that location is determined (server or client-side) The zip code is handed off to a server-side process which renders a page with the zip code…

Using Ansible to Deploy Elixir Applications on Dokku

For me, the best (and most fun!) way to learn is to find a problem with a new set of tools you want to learn. I’ve documented my process of learning Ansible below, I hope it’s interesting to others! Motivation I built an application with Elixir and Phoenix and deployed it using Gigalixir. Gigalixir worked well, but after a couple of weeks the site shut down due to a lack of updates (I was on the free tier). Since this project is strictly for learning, I figured it would be fun to learn Ansible and save a couple bucks by signing up for a free VPS service. I initially chose Vultr because they offered $50 of free credit towards a $3.50/month VPS, which should be more than enough for a year…

My Process for Intentional Learning

Lately, I’ve been able to carve out dedicated to learning new skills. What I’ve learned has been random, from programming languages to how to build a tiny house. I’ve found a lot of joy in learning new skills, slowly becoming a generalist. Over the last year, I’ve found you can optimize your "learning time" by thinking through the process of learning before you start. In my experience, picking a learning project, and creating a "learning log" for each skill is hugely helpful. Identify a Learning Project Learning in a vacuum doesn’t work for me. I love reading fiction, but reading a topic that I have no immediate need to understand makes it much harder to comprehend…

Learning Clojure by Automating an RSS Reader

I’ve been working on revamping how I consume information. Most of my information consumption has been moved to RSS feeds, but I can’t keep up with the number of articles in my feeds. When I take a look at my reader I tend to get overwhelmed and spend more time than I’d like to trying to "catch up" on information I generally was consuming out of curiosity. Not good. I want articles to be automatically marked as read after they are a month old to eliminate the feeling of being "behind". This is a perfect little project to learn a programming language that’s looked interesting for a while! Building a small project in a new language or technology is the best way to learn…

Tag: learning