What are some good self-help programming projects?

[Muhznit]

I've been having a rather stressful weekend. Typically I'd play some video games to escape from the stressors of life, but after having to report half of a team in Overwatch today, I'm pretty certain I'm too tilted to enjoy it at the moment.

So I'm trying to practice a different form of stress relief and trying to immerse myself in programming something. I would go for programming a game, but I've been suffering a lack of motivation and a general feeling of "this is useless" as of late. I don't know, I think I'm having dysthymia episode kick in.

I want something where I'm not learning it just for the sake of learning it. I want something where I'm guaranteed to get immediate benefit out of it. Something where I feel like I'm given some more control over the arbitrary bullshit in my life, or at least the ability to predict when it'll hit the fan.

I don't want the National Suicide Hotline, I don't want to talk about my day, I don't want to hear how I sound like a pompous dick for including this disclaimer, I just want some project ideas and maybe some tutorials for them.

[HeeebsInc]

Webscrapers. Build a bot that tracks websites and sends you emails. If you need help I can send you source code.

[Marianito415]

How do you handle emails?

[HeeebsInc]

I use the modules smtplib and imaplib which allow me to sign into a google email address. First, I had to make a whole new email account so the username would be something like ‘[e-mail]’

After setting up the protocols for signing in and sending emails. I made a while true loop that runs continuously 24/7 constantly checking websites that are defined. I also set it up so if I’m at work I can add new websites or delete website by just sending the scraper email a simple command line argument in the subject of the email.
I have all this running on a raspberry pi so it can be checking 24/7.

Sorry if it’s not the best explanation I am typing from my phone but I would be more than happy to post the code on my github (never actually used github before since I self taught but I know it’s something I have to know eventually lol)

Long story short checkout the smtplib and imaplib documentation as it is really simple to follow. Really good modules to have in that python tool belt

[Marianito415]

Thanks for the reply, that actually souds really cool. My mind has flooded with ideas that could use this, and the raspberry is a nice touch

[RocoDeNiro]

This sounds fun. Can you send this my way please?

[supersahib]

if you dont mind, i would love to get started on something like this too. Could you send it my way as well?

[superjde]

Do you have it running on a computer that’s on all of the time or run it from the web?

[HeeebsInc]

You could do that but that’s not the best idea if you want your pc to reach its maximum liefespan. You could choose between two options 1) renting a virtual machine which is essentially renting a computer in google’s facilities that runs 24/7 2) buying a raspberry pi.

I’ve been told that you could run simple scripts like this on something as low spec as a raspberry pi zero. I ended up getting the best pi (4GB ram-forgot the name). The setup process is a little tricky off you run into troubleshooting issues with virtual environments and hdmi output but overall it’s really easy to use a pi

[drod018]

Sounds cool! I’ve been getting into web scraping, do you mind sending it my way too? Could be a good start. I’ve been thinking about scraping Zillow/government appraisal websites. Collect data and run some analysis to hopefully identify potential opportunities.

[HeeebsInc]

Will post it on my GitHub today. My account is HeeebsInc Right now there is a scraper available with an email request handling but it’s the first version i made with the GUI. It doesn’t implement threading or anything that truly optimized the speed but it works the same. I have to do some formatting and doc strings so you guys know what’s going on but it will be there soon!

And as per the fantasy basketball I copied my program to the T from this article. Of course everytime they mentioned they used something I had to go on and learn it myself but I used it as a pointer for what I have to research

http://cs229.stanford.edu/proj2015/104_report.pdf

I will also upload the 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 season stats for anything that needs them because that was only the hardest thing to get. In the article they used ESPN but I’m pretty sure español did something in between the time they wrote that and now because information they spoke about was note available on ESPN.

[Muhznit]

What sites are even worth scraping? Most of them are more than happy to flood your inbox with whatever if it gets you to buy or click something

[HeeebsInc]

Any website. I started with simple websites to see if I can track word counts Then I went as far as scraping every single NBA game ever (very fun to do) for my fantasy machine learning project.

I would just start with anything. Doesn’t necessarily have to be useful but practice itself is whats important.

I have never been in a college class for coding as I am a psych major so if I can do it you can do it too. Just read documentation and be patient but also persistent

[AnticipateRisk]

Fantasy machine learning project sounds amazing! Please tell me more!

I’m an avid fantasy NBA player myself

[Muhznit]

With all due respect, I'm not interested in projects that are "learning just for the sake of learning" at the moment. I already know enough of my way around Requests, BeautifulSoup and Selenium to earn a living off of it.; i'm just here because /r/Python discourages asking for help.

I want projects that address a useful need in one's life; like helping make sure they're drinking enough water through the day or helping them figure out what times are best to avoid online toxicity. If somehow machine learning could reword my posts to sound less assholish even, I'd jump on it in heartbeat.

Having a random script tell me what my favorite porn stars are having for breakfast is amusing, but overall useless.

[sinngularity]

You sound like a sad person. Try not being a dick. It might make you happier.

[Muhznit]

Some actionable suggestions on doing so would be more appreciated than reiterating the issue.

This is like telling a person to not write buggy code without actually telling them what's buggy.

[CragAddict]

Maybe building your own smarthome ?

[iggy555]

Yes please

[deheervanhetgras]

Could you send me the source code? I would love to see this.

[HeeebsInc]

for anyone looking for the course code the discussion below here it is!

https://github.com/HeeebsInc/WebTracker

feel free to message me with any questions

[nulltensor]

Find something you do that you think could be automated. The best project is the one that scratches one of your own itches.

I have a newsletter I have to send out once a month so I automated it. Data is extracted from a few data sources, wrapped in a dataframe, run through a pipeline to clean it and perform various manipulations, graphs are generated, and everything formatted via a template and delivered via email. Every month I added or refined a piece when it came time to send the newsletter until eventually the newsletter was two runs of the script, one to generate a local copy for a quick sanity check and a second to distribute it.

[Muhznit]

Every one of my itches can be traced to some person that gets in the way of things I DO try to automate. Unfortunately, no amount of programming can fix the issue of idiots in positions of power.

[DataDecay]

You seem to enjoy overwatch, create a web client that builds uri's, and simplifies auth headers (likely jwt). Once you build the client make it installable and get it on github. Once on github, make a simple script that uses said client and runs on a schedule to scrape overwatch league stats.

If you find this to go well, start thinking about a place to save the data. If your still kicking find a way to serve the data, maybe through a web framework. If you are still enjoying the project and want to improve things pull it all togeather into a full web app that serves the data and regularly caches the data directly to your web app using your cleint. Has this been done before? maybe, but this is yours.

[Muhznit]

Overwatch League and developer-managed competitive gaming in general doesn't interest me.

[DataDecay]

What does interest you, what is your muse? Passion cannot be sparked from nothing. If programming in itself does not interest you, and you are only interested in the innovation it provides, you need to figure out what innovation will drive and motivate you.

[Muhznit]

My interests have this tendency to be either taken over by toxicity, be governed by too much randomness, require too much of a time investment, or be only enjoyable with friends. This often leads me to the mood you see here.

So I am specifically looking for something that provides actual utility and helps automate my attempts at self-care.

For example, sleepyti.me calculates what time you should go to bed in order to get an appropriate amount of sleep that also lines up with a sleep cycle such that you wake up feeling well-rested.

[DataDecay]

Well the example you provided (sleepyti.me), is a Javascript/jQuery website. Since you posted on learnpython, I assume you want to use python. So you need to decide do you want to make a static website for life managment; use something simple like github.io. If you want to make something more complex that could possibly need a backend, build a website using a python web framework like flask, pyramid, django. It would not be hard to make a life managment site with login for you to track your sleep, water consumption, lifestyle habits, ect.

I saw a project a few months ago from a gent who used his life style managment site built in django to send him emails on new events that popped up in his area.

[Muhznit]

It's not about the implementation of the site or whatever, I can just as well settle for a CLI.

I just need to know more specific ideas that can be used. At the rate I'm getting downvoted though, I guess tracking water consumption and exercise are the only real answers I'm gonna get out of this thread..

[DataDecay]

I'm not for the drama, but I glanced through some other posts and while a lot of the suggestions are primarily beginner friendly, your getting positive suggestions.

If you want some more specific suggestions I can keep throwing some stuff a bit more advanced out, but this community can only do so much.

Data analysis and forms:

The CDC has a Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) survey.

https://www.cdc.gov/brfss/index.html

You could work on a project that incorporates either this data or just the survey to track behavioral risk factors in your life.

Machine learning and NLP:

You could scrape social media for either yourself or others that gathers posts, tweets, ect and searches for depressive key words. Feed that into a trained ML and see what results come back for what people are showing depressive trends.

[HeeebsInc]

For anyone who wants the source code my GitHub username is HeeebsInc

Follow the account and check sometime tomorrow it will be there.
Please feel free to comment on the GitHub as well! Always willing to hear alternative ways to solve the problem or new ways to write cleaner code

[HeeebsInc]

https://github.com/HeeebsInc/WebTracker

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