Our instructor Jeff is also an author, here are some tips from his blog, a great coding resource:

As an instructor at Byte Academy, a high school AP computer science teacher, and a former middle school teacher, I’ve worked with countless beginning computer programmers. I’ve been there for everyone - from 10-year-old kids to adult career changers - while they write their first “Hello, World!” programs in languages like Python, JavaScript, C, PHP, Ruby, and even with MIT’s cool Scratch.

tl;dr

• Learning to code is no more difficult than learning anything else because all skills have a similarly high mastery point.
• Learning to code seems harder than learning other stuff because it has a higher barrier to entry.
• There’s proven strategies you can use to make this barrier to entry less intimidating.

Let’s say I’m making a blogging web application using Python and the web framework, Django. I want users to be able to publish “Posts” on my blogging website.

When they enter that “Post” into some sort of input form that I have on my website, I want to check the “Post” before I save it to my database.

This is a common scenario for many Django developers. How do we validate form data before we save it to a database?

There’s two common ways to do it: Either validate the Model or validate the Form.

Django has Forms and Models. Very basically, Forms are where users input data on a web application, and Models and where I actually save my information in my program.

Let’s look first at how to validate the Model:

Our new instructor Jeff is also an author, here are some tips from his blog, a great coding resource:

I’ve got a URL shortening website like Bitly that allows you to submit a link, then gives you a new, hopefully shorter url to use for that link. I built it with Python and the Flask microframework.

Right now, a user enters a URL at my flask app, such as “www.jeffreymaxim.com”. My python code will generate a random key for that site, such as “98rDv64O”. It will store both the original URL and the key in a python dictionary like so:

<span class="s1">my_links["www.jeffreymaxim.com"] = "98rDv64O"</span>

So that I’ve got an entry in the my_links dictionary that looks like this:

<span class="s1">{'www.jeffreymaxim.com': '98rDv64O'}</span>

This code allows me to redirect a user from herokuapp to jeffmaxim.com .

The problem here is that this dictionary only lives in the local memory of my machine while my app is running. As soon as I restart my server, that whole dictionary and all my links and keys gets deleted.

The solution is to implement a database.