I’d like to do something useful. No kidding. Something I or someone else could use. When I come up with some idea I start to think about details and about what technologies I should use for its implementation. Speaking about technology I want to say that I prefer using something I’ve never used before. And here lies the rub. When I start to learn something I start with the idea of getting some satisfactory level of deep knowledge of the subject, not only some basic understanding enough only for “hello world”.
For example, I wanted to create a small web app which will help me to send POST request (need for my current job project). I’ve chosen Python and Flask as technologies, mostly because I’m learning Python now. Ok, let’s read what Flask is. Hm, it’s based on Werkzeug and Jinja2. Well, let us a look at them. WSGI? What’s that?
After some time I found myself sitting in front of my computer with VIM opened and a few lines of code there:
#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from wsgiref.simple_server import make_server
def app(environ, start_response):
start_response('200 Ok', [('Content-type', 'text/html')])
return ['Hello from wsgi!']
httpd = make_server('', 8005, app)
httpd.serve_forever()That’s too far away from my initial task as you understand. So what happened?
When I started to read about Flask it turned out that I don’t want to use it until I get a deeper understanding of its underlying mechanisms. The same about Werkzeug and Jinja. Don’t know whether I should cry or laugh. On the one hand this will for deep knowledge serves me well - after spending some hours/days/weeks/months of reading and trying I feel like a pro in the subject. But on the other hand I spent my time learning and not doing something really useful.
Remember the beginning of the post?