Recently I saw an advert for some Stack Skills courses. On seeing it I remembered I had purchased a load of courses on an offer a while ago so I decided to take a look at what I had.

One of the courses I purchased was a python course. A lot of it was python basics, but there was also a couple of more advanced ones:

• ​Create a Web Application with Flask
  
• Create a Web Application with Django
• Create a Flappy Bird Clone with PyGame

I've already created web apps with Flask before and may try the Django one soon but today I decided to follow the PyGame tutorial.

I managed to complete the tutorial but there are definitely aspects I want to improve. I followed the tutorial fairly closely as to make it easier and only changed subtle things.

The problem with the tutorial is that the code is fairly inconsistent, the structure isn't particularly great and there is no testing or comments.

Examples of this, are things like variable naming:

block_move = 3
x_block = surfaceWidth
y_block = 0
block_width = 75

Why wouldn't you just call it block_x and block_y to follow convention, also the use of camel case is interchanged with snake case a few times, such as the surfaceWidth variable above and also with functions as well:

gameOver():
replay_or_quit():

Okay so maybe I'm being a little harsh and those things I didn't actually add into my version but it does make you wonder about a lot of the information out there. How much of the tutorials and courses are actually written by people who have just about learnt enough about the subject to be able to tell it to someone else?

​

So now that I've completed the tutorial I've taken a step back and taken a look at the code and I already want to refactor a lot of it. So here is a list of the things I want to do (regardless of whether I ever get round to doing them:

So like I said earlier there was not a single sign of a test in the whole tutorial, which is no surprise really. Most tutorials are simply to give someone the basics of how something works so they can then go away and work on it. They don't tend to care about good practices too much or thinking about software development as a craft. This showed in that a couple of times in the tutorial there were bugs, some that I spotted instantly and others that he had to go back through and try and spot them.

Before I start refactoring any of the code I really need to write some unit test, that way I can confirm that the functionality doesn't change whilst performing the refactoring.

I would like to split out some of this functionality into a few different files/classes as this one python file is pretty bloated. It works okay for a simple tutorial for pygame but I would certainly want to split things out if I wanted to take this any further.

All the functionality in the main game loop is crazy, and certainly doesn't have just one single responsibility.

I would want to create a python module from the game so that you can install it and all it's dependencies with pip. I'll also want to update the readme to explain the dependency on PyGame and also how to install it.

I actually had a lot of fun following the tutorial, It's been a while since I've done any game development really and now I know how easy it is to do with PyGame I would be tempted to throw together some simple 2D games with it.

I will probably do the changes I mention above as I always think that If it's a Repo on my GitHub Account, then it's essentially a representation of my work and I'm not currently happy with how it is.

Thanks :)

I just wanted to put a quick post up about some prototyping I am doing at work. I have been given the task of creating a dummy web application which has taken me into a realm I am not familiar with at all so I thought I would talk about it a little. 

I basically had total control over what technology I used for this application and someone suggested to use Perl as people had used it for other application we have. I really didn't want to use Perl and there is a couple of reasons for this:

1. If I have to learn a new language I would rather it be one that I like the look of
2. I would rather learn one that is becoming more popular rather than one that is dying off.
3. There are a few people in work that are willing to help with this little prototype and they have more expertise with python.
4. Python has SQLAlchemy which supports both database types we will need to use.

I will now talk a little bit about the other choices I have made in terms of tech: 
I've decided to use Flask as it is a lightweight web framework which will allow me to do exactly what I need. This web application isn't complex so I didn't really want something large and all encompassing.

As the Web application has to use DB's I've decided to use SQLAlchemy as it seems fairly popular, has support for MySQL(The Test DB I am using for this) but also support for DB2(What we will likely deploy it on). 

Finally virtualenv. This is something I've never used before but it seems like it is going to be really useful as deployment to other machines can be done without worry as It won't matter about them having the correct python version or flask version installed. 

All in all it's been great, I've had to learn a lot so far and I'm finally getting the hang of how it all fits together. I've been lucky enough to have another application to use for guidance through this development and so I should have it up and running in no time.