Learning by doing Python

As ever, it is much easier for me to learn things by doing. I’ve been mulling the idea of a topic-based index to this site, which will take a fair amount of doing, but as preparation I need to know which of the thousands of posts are worth including. Probably they’re going to be relatively long, maybe more than 500 words. There’s obviously no way I am going to open each one to check, so I need a little script. A fine way to learn a bit more Python.

Yesterday I suprised myself by actually getting it done without too much pain and in a reasonably short time. This isn’t quite cargo cult programming, in that I do actually try and understand what I am doing and change what I find on the beach to something that works properly for me. Yesterday, that meant a bit more learning about pathlib and, especially, glob.

Actually making use of the list posts I have identified in that way will take a bit more doing. More to the point, it throws up some interesting possibilities for extending my learning-by-doing. What is the distribution of post lengths? Is there anything to be seen in the posts per day of the week? Or hour of the day?

Nobody except me will probably be interested, and I’m not even sure I’m that interested. But those are good real-life questions I could learn to answer, and that will help me to answer more interesting questions.