R1D3 Learning More Python Lists and Exploring the Wordpress API
For Day 3 I continued to work more on my old_posts python script. My favorite part of 100 Days of Code is that I am taking the time to actually think through some of these problems, read documentation, and try to learn something.
Python Lists
Learned a ton about python lists thanks to this wonderful google developer guide. Specifically (after writing python for about 5 years) I learned aboutlist.extend()
for the very first time. Came in handy in this particular use case because I was doing some very inefficient for loops
to append
to a list when it was more efficient to extend
since it requires less operations.
The key differnce is that append will add a single to the end of a list, where extend will inject a list to the end of a list merging the two lists. This is particularly handy when you want to grab JSON from several requests and merge them together into a single JSON object for further processing which is what I am doing in this script.
Using Requests HEAD
I also explored more of the requests library and made an optimization that looks really silly in hindsight.In the script I was making a single request in order to grab the headers to see the total number of pages. Instea of using request.head
which has a tiny payload of headers, I was using request.get
which gets the headers along with the entire JSON payload. This was immediately thrown away since I did not use the response in later parts of the function.
Exploring the Wordpress API Filters
I also explored more of the WordPress API and started to use some API level filters to reduce the payload that I was receiving in an effort to reduce the overall time that the script takes to run. Specifically I am now usingcontext=embed
which removes the text body (since I only need the title and the link), and before=(today - 1 year + 1 day)
since I only care about posts that were written more than a year ago today.
JSON is Not SQL
I’ve been thinking about my very first forray into any sort of programming years ago. I primarily worked with Microsoft SQL Server and learned how to write efficient queries. I was thinking of how easy this problem would have been to solve if I had direct access to the database. The lesson here, that it is still taking me a while to fully wrap my head around, is that JSON is not a SQL database. You have to think about it differently. If an API offers the ability to do some filtering you should take advantage of it when you can.Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on mastodon or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
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- Setting up ANTLR4 on Windows
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- 20 Years of Ubuntu
- видно по глазам - you can see it in the eyes
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Serendipity from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
- Andrea Veri: GNOME Infrastructure migration to AWS from Planet GNOME
- A Whale of a Time from https://popagandhi.com/
- Pluralistic: You should be using an RSS reader (16 Oct 2024) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Sahil Dhiman: 25, A Quarter of a Century Later from Planet Debian
- Reflections on Palantir from Nabeel S. Qureshi
- Reading Old Posts from Kev Quirk
- Capture less than you create from David Heinemeier Hansson
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Script Doctoring
I’ve been having a number of communications problems in my interactions with my doctors at Kaiser lately, and it’s becoming one of those things where the burden and onus entirely is placed upon me to sort out, and that’s exhausting for the actually autist…
via Bix Dot Blog October 22, 2024Blockchain company Forte acquires games studios, demands secrecy, shuts them down
Sometime in 2023, blockchain firm Forte acquired game studios Phoenix Labs and Rumble Games. However, it would be a year before this came to light, because according to a report from Game Developer, Forte demanded secrecy from employ…
via Web3 is Going Just Great October 22, 2024Initial explorations of Anthropic's new Computer Use capability
Two big announcements from Anthropic today: a new Claude 3.5 Sonnet model and a new API mode that they are calling computer use. (They also pre-announced Haiku 3.5, but that's not available yet so I'm ignoring it until I can try it out myself.) Comp…
via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries October 22, 2024Generated by openring