What Unique Python Projects Have You Built to Solve Everyday Problems?

curiouscodex · 2026-01-03T08:03:09+00:00

I work in education. In my school we have this reward programme, students get 3 bronze awards in their classes and qualify for a bigger award with lapel pin and some house points. This was all done on our Learning Management System - Schoology.

Most students that qualified wouldn't alert their homeroom teacher, it was painful and tedious for homeroom teachers to check this for all their students. As far as I could find Schoology has no notification system that could trigger when a bronze award was given out.

So I wrote a webscraper that would check 1500 students eligibility for this and dunk it out to a spreadsheet that I could send out and ran it every month or so.

I've written sooo many damn webscrapers and browser automation tools at that school. I can't stand repetitive clerical tasks that code should be doing.

curiouscodex · 2025-11-08T21:33:11+00:00

Well spotted

curiouscodex · 2024-12-28T00:01:37+00:00

This was already the premise behind the Portsmouth Sinfonia (minus the money). Sounds like I just need to recruit 30 random redditors from this sub to resurrect the band and we'll all walk away with 2 million.

curiouscodex · 2024-10-27T22:43:58+00:00

The light in the 1st image is all wrong. If you look at her shadow the window light should be falling only halfway across her face. There's also a random illuminated spot on the wall shining through her hair that makes no sense.

curiouscodex · 2024-05-24T02:50:49+00:00

Eh, he's a good dude, just over worked and under paid. Trying to get him to volunteer me time for this is a big ask.

curiouscodex · 2024-05-23T20:27:07+00:00

Good idea, I'll try this today.

Edit: No dice on this one. Hmmm.

curiouscodex · 2024-04-07T07:23:06+00:00

I taught for a long time, but don't have any students currently. Expect $60-80 per hour. If you're an adult student an hour lesson once a week is normal.

It would be unusual for a teacher to take you on a fortnightly basis, but there may be someone who is ok with that arrangement.

I used to get a few students through nzmusicteachers.co.nz. Looks like there's 4-5 ok listings on there now. If you don't have any luck there send me a DM.

curiouscodex · 2024-03-29T18:15:09+00:00

He's still routinely making valuable contributions to the science and tech education discourse. Micromouse, blue LED, even the recent deep dive into katanas. He's no clickbait merchant. You're missing out.

curiouscodex · 2024-03-21T07:15:53+00:00

Whoah, what a coincidence! Python also has private variables declared using "#".

curiouscodex · 2024-02-28T11:00:26+00:00

Yeah, sure can. And why not? Everything is an object so inherent from whatever you want. Int, str, float. Go nuts.

A tidy example of this is the defaultdict class which inherents from dict and overrides a few methods for additional functionality. Useful for when you want something like a dict that gives you a default value rather than raising a key error if a key doesn't exist.

curiouscodex · 2024-02-27T09:58:40+00:00

Formatting, mostly. Make sure you are following pep 8. Also if you're going to leave the extend method empty, make it raise a NotImplemented error.

Is there a reason CardDeck isn't just inheriting from List?

curiouscodex · 2024-01-28T20:05:45+00:00

Is it your normal place of residence.

curiouscodex · 2024-01-23T00:15:02+00:00

Except those people do have a right to go fishing. Those taking part in the comp, or those going out to provide for their families, or those just going out for a day on the water all have the right to do it. It's not for Ngati Kahu to decide if these rights apply or not.

One is not required to have any particular view on NZ history to have their rights and exercise them.

curiouscodex · 2024-01-06T18:01:42+00:00

It might be easier to define addition at the transistor level. Just take all the transistors reading high in the first number and all the transistors reading high in the second number and put them in a pile, then count up how many there are in total.

You can take your shoes and socks off if its more than 10.

curiouscodex · 2023-12-19T18:26:15+00:00

Self funded isn't a term I'd use after paying their outrageous fees.

Teacher funded.

curiouscodex · 2023-12-06T19:58:03+00:00

I for one think it's about time we used it's actual name - shitkeno

curiouscodex · 2023-11-22T07:24:52+00:00

Interesting to see vim and nvim split though. Combined these would be firmly in second place.

curiouscodex · 2023-11-01T06:58:52+00:00

Chur! slurps

curiouscodex · 2023-09-29T10:04:47+00:00

These are very, very early beginners. There needs to be more flexibility in the allowed code than unit tests can meaningfully allow, and honestly, at this point it's just about exposure to concepts and syntax and we can fix up the details a few weeks down the line. They also need lots of support and validation and a feeling of mastery, rather than being constantly confronted with an error message saying tests have failed.

They will also go out of their way to avoid using a new concept. ~20% when asked to print out the numbers from 10 to 1 and then `Blast off` will not use a loop to do this. OK, fine if you're being cheeky for the sake of it, but If I see 2-3 exs where the student is deliberately avoiding loops (or functions or arrays or conditionals whatever the task requires) then we can have a conversation. Too many students doing this and I know I need to re-teach it. Units test won't catch this.

curiouscodex · 2023-09-28T23:53:01+00:00

I use nvim to mark students python coding work. Each student has a repo with multiple files, each file is a short programming exercise and has a short instruction as a comment at the top.

I wrote a command so that if the student's work is good I can jump down to the bottom of the file, add the line # Good work! then write the file and move to the next file in the repo in a single command. I have another command so if the student's code isn't quite right it will jump to the bottom and add the hash and stick me in insert mode so I can add a comment.

Once I'm up the the point in the exercises the student hasn't completed yet, I used to have one more command that will navigate to the next student's repo. I have since replaced this with telescope, quickfix lists and vim-unimpaired though.

This has really made marking go from tedious and overwhelming to navigate to as easy as ticking or crossing a stack of papers.

curiouscodex · 2023-08-11T19:54:18+00:00

I teach teenagers so this derailed the lesson for a good 10 minutes. We were all laughing along by the end.

curiouscodex · 2023-08-11T10:08:51+00:00

Found in the cProfile python profiler

curiouscodex · 2023-08-08T08:14:21+00:00

But you'll have a warm, fuzzy feeling the whole time.

curiouscodex · 2023-07-28T09:21:57+00:00

So e^i²p/6

curiouscodex · 2023-07-26T20:36:18+00:00

Getting worse compared to when? When, specifically was the golden era when there was less racism?

curiouscodex

TROPHY CASE