Week

Going forward

The Dallas homework

Yes the Dallas-OIS homework is due by the end of today. If you are still struggling with it, and are not close to finished with it, well, it's because it's nearly impossible, even for a good programmer, to cram on a project on deadline. And it's much more difficult if you haven't been practicing regularly.

At the very least, show that you can:

  1. Scrape a webpage
  2. Scrape a series of webpages
  3. Use a loop
  4. Use a loop to connect data from one source (Dallas PD) to another (Google Maps)

– and turn in what you have. Then work on your final projects.


The takeaways

Most of you aren't competent programmers at this point. Luckily, that wasn't the main point of the class. The main point was to understand how computers work with information, and to realize their power and their limitations:

  1. Computers are dumb. They do nothing and assume nothing unless you, or another programmer, tells it what to do.
  2. If something is repeatable, think about what parts are repetitive, then give it to a computer to do.

Understanding that is the key to at least not being a passive consumer in a society that is increasingly being dominated by computational processes.

Learning more

Bash is a pretty tough language to learn; while it's very easy to do things very quickly, it's also unforgiving if you've failed to do things step-by-step and really think through what you actually wanted to do.

So try Python, and web stuff:


Some scattered notes for this last week: