I recently renewed work on my first ever github project. Over the course of a whole year when that project was dormant, I’d learned some new tricks. I now try to focus on writing tests for my projects. It is immensely convenient when I add features here  and there and need to check the whole code for errors.

Anyways, my project requires API keys to imgur.com. However I do not want to hard-code them into my test.py file. But I also do not want to manually provide keys every time I run tests. So what do I do?

I am taking a High Performance Computing course this semester. For that we have to ssh into the university’s computing cluster. The interface is entirely console based. Now that might seem awesome at first: typing away commands like a “hacker”. And it is awesome. But after a while it gets tiring, particularly when I am writing code.

Over the last weekend, I was looking to brush up my web-dev skills (what little I had learned on the side). I decided to make a simple web app for my residents to use (I am a Resident Advisor).

Objective: Display tips, event news, free food notifications provided regularly by RAs and faculty to residents on a website.

Say you are an up and coming web developer. You want to make a web app that can access content on other sites. Perhaps you want to make a word cloud from a news article on BBC. Or you want to see what videos a site has embedded within itself. You could achieve that by doing some server side voodoo. The ‘standard’ way to go about it would be to download the site to your server and then serve its contents to your webpage.  But that would require two things: