As part of my learning goals for 2018, I wanted to work through various books. This is part of  my work with Python.

It’s the end of the month, and I’m behind. I know it’s a short month, but it’s not that short. I had time to read the last couple week and I did some reading, but I didn’t get much practice.

First the positive, then the excuses.

Reading

I did manage to read through the basic tutorial in Part I for how to use he BeautifulSoup module to read through an http page. This provided more ideas for finding sections of code and extracting out sections.

I started Part II, which talks about more in depth http, with forms and posting. I’m still inside that one, and as of this point, I’m only 30% through the book.

The plan for this weekend is to stop and practice a bit from BeautifulSoup and see what I can accomplish by reading a few web pages.

Life Gets in the Way

This month I had two long events on weekends that ate into my reading/working time, as well as a work project. I’m in the middle of volleyball season, and February brought me two 3 day tournaments to coach or watch. One was coaching a 13 year old team, and that occupied a lot of time. The evenings were spent with other coaches and I didn’t bring a laptop because I knew time would be limited. Add to that the need to get a few things done before and after the trip and I couldn’t practice web scraping.

The second trip was for my daughter, and apart from watching her, my wife was in charge of team activities and I had to help. I had my laptop, but again, no time. I also chose to enjoy some time with my wife in the evening, which was worth it.

Work was busy. We’re trying to migrate SQLServerCentral to a new platform and I’ve had to test things, as well as try and get other work done. As a result, I’ve been busy during the week and couldn’t even make time to incorporate any web scraping into my job. I also had to get other work done, so it’s been too busy to do much learning.