Now, in my defense I was pretty sick for most of last week so I ended up not getting much done outside of work besides a lot of napping. I started with a vague plan to do something with Flask, the Python micro-webframework and to that end I succeeded in what I set out to do. It had been a while since I had done anything serious with Python and I’ve been feeling the urge to get back into it.
I ended up spending a lot of time just getting my Python development environment set up. Apparently it’s been so long since I’ve done anything non-trivial in the language that I didn’t even have basic tools set up well on this computer. I wanted to do things right and that took a bit of installing and uninstalling through various channels to get things just so. This meant Python installed threw Homebrew and then using that version of pip to install virtualenv. This way I didn’t have to use sudo to install virtualenv. While this ended up being more frustrating than it should have been (and at one point led to me asking a Stack Overflow question that I later answered for myself) I did get things set up nicely, which is a major win.
Once I got down to setting up Flask thing were pretty smooth. For the basic stuff I was doing it felt very similar to Sinatra, which I’ve worked with quite a bit. I finally got to use Python’s method decorators in practice which was neat (they drive the routing around the functions related to the routes).
The end result was a pretty basic first test site. Nothing really worth putting up anywhere. I’d like to keep playing with Flask and get a bit more reacquainted with Python so unless I have another burning project come up, I might just stick with it this week too.