IZBR
Hi! My name is Isaac Basque-Rice, I'm A Security Engineer and former Abertay Ethical Hacker, and this website is a repository for all the cool stuff I've done, enjoy!
Project maintained by IBRice101 Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham
Automate the Boring Stuff with Python
On July 1st, 2021 the Udemy course for Automate the Boring Stuff with Python became free with a coupon, so I decided to have a little crack at it
A lot of the earlier stuff is (as you can imagine) sort of dull for someone who’s been programming for… However long I’ve been doing it now, but still it seems like a pretty invaluable resource as the course goes on, especially for someone who hates boring stuff lol.
In particular, the later sections that make use of third party modules such as pyautogui for i/o interaction and openpyxl for xlsx interaction really had my mind racing with regards to ways I could apply this kind of stuff in the field. Not to mention email interaction and the ability to pull and sort data through an imported PDF module and the use of RegEx (which, to my shame and even though I have been taught it in uni, I still don’t exactly have down)
All in all I think this course is a fantastic place to begin, and maybe even end, for non-technical people. The large focus on nailing the basics of python scripting was great for me to go back over (and even pick up one or two new good habits along the way), but ended up becoming quite tedious in parts, my GitHub repo (linked at the end) reflects this, with it being pretty much divided into “Parts I knew” and “parts I learned from”
In many ways, this was really more a vim tutorial, although Al may not have intended it that way. During the course of my working on this project I decided, for the first time, to do it exclusively in vim, throw myself in at the deep end I guess. And you know what? It’s actually really helping me learn! Vim is a really fantastic editor, check out my article on it here, and my current working vimrc (that I only have configured for python and markdown editing at the moment) here. My vim journey is only just beginning and to be honest I feel like a child on Christmas
A note: some folders have significantly less content than others, this because a lot of work done in the course is done exclusively in the console and is therefore not save-able in this context
I completed the course on the 18th of July 2021 at around 6PM :)
The Git repo with all products of my work is available at my GitHub
Thanks to Al Sweigart, the author.