DEV Community: Christian Lutz

What inspires you about programming?

Christian Lutz — Wed, 12 Jun 2019 16:46:41 +0000

Hello fellow programmers! 🙋‍♂️

We all already know, programming is awesome and makes a lot of fun.
You can do virtually anything. From creating applications over to programming machines up to creating images of black holes.

My questions to you are:
What inspires you about programming?
Why do you have started to learn to program?
What websites (besides dev.to) do you visit, to get inspired?

Let us discuss!

Should you follow a tutorial about a specific topic and implement it into your project? 🤔

Christian Lutz — Sun, 05 May 2019 12:29:38 +0000

I'm working on an authentification function for my project "ServerMonitor". My knowledge about such a topic is quite small, so I searched for a tutorial on YouTube to get it done.

Working through this tutorial helps me a lot but it feels wrong.
Everything I have programmed so far was a one to one copy of this tutorial which brings me to the following question.

Should you follow a tutorial about a specific topic and implement it into your project?

I mean, you get a lot done and learn something but it is not your own code.
Should you rather try to get through the documentation and try to solve everything on your own?

How do you deal with it?

May I introduce? ServerMonitor! | The process of creating a web application

Christian Lutz — Sun, 28 Apr 2019 12:58:26 +0000

It is time! 🎉🎉 🔥🔥
Version 1.0.0 of ServerMonitor is officially released and it feels awesome!💪

Introduction 🤝

In this article, I want to tell you about my process of developing my first real project from start to finish. Far too often I had the problem of never finishing any project I have started.

Maybe this article motivates you to get through the process of starting your own project and working on it until it's finished.

How the project got started? 🙋

ServerMonitor started as a simple idea to check if a website is online or not.
My goal for this project was to start as simple as it gets.
On previous attempts, my idea for a web application was way too big to finish it in a manageable time. The approach of starting as small as you can imagine is crucial if you want to finish your project successfully.

Planning 📝

To get an idea of how a website monitoring web app looks like, I searched for other websites that do this already. After some search I found isitdown.site. This website already does everything what I wanted to have in my web app too. The best part of it was, it is created with Flask and is open source. The source code of this website was helpful some times if I did not know any further.

Now I knew how my project should look and behave.
This helped me to find the first task I had to do.

Developing! 💻

Starting phase 🚲

The first task I had to do was obviously to create a new Flask project.
After that, I started to code the basic function of the web app.
Which does mean: Creating a function that checks the response of a website and print it on the screen.

So far so good.
After the basic function was implemented, I became even more motivated to work on my project. The next step was also clear. This app requires a user interface so that you can also check other websites.

Half time 🚗

I think around the half time of the development phase, I started making plans for what I have to do next. So I set up a "Projects" panel on Github to get a better overview of the next steps I have to do.

Breaking up the next bigger goals in small parts and writing them down in a Kanban board helped me a lot to stay focused on the goal. This approach of working is very rewarding because every time you finished something, you can move the card over to "Done".

At the half time of my development process, my web app looked like that. You can see, the design was not much different compared to the current version. Only the colors have changed.

Of course, the web app could do a bit more in this development phase than the first version. I implemented a history to see the last 10 checked websites and some additional information about the checked website itself.

Finish line ✈️

At this period of the development process - talking about calendar week 16 and 17 - a lot of work was done.

I ...
... changed the UI to the current version.
... added more rows for additional information about the checked website.
... reworked the monitoring function.
... added an explanation of what this web app is about and how to use it.
... reworked the "Info" page - Means adding a changelog and a "Contact Me" form.

Aaand I fixed bugs.

My motivation to keep going at this time came right out of my ❤️. I wanted to bring this project to an end I can be proud of. Working on a project get a lot easier if there is a foundation to build on. Everything you work on for now expands your web app.

Deploying to DigitalOcean 🤓

The first time I have deployed a version of my web app was on April 20th. Exactly in the "finish line" week. That means, working on the project and deploying took place at the same time.

Working this way was a good idea. Some of the problems I had with my code only appeared after deploying it to the web server. I also created a new Kanban board on Github called "Release sprint" and added all the todo's I had to do for release.

Working with a web server is a lot of work but it makes fun. I learned a lot about bash and all this server stuff. Don't underestimate the time which you have to spend to solve problems. Often I searched for a solution until two o'clock in the morning.

Why DigitalOcean?

Some of you may be asking why I use DigitalOcean and why I like it so much.

Before I opted for DigitalOcean, I tested Heroku and AWS. After all this testing, my conclusion was, DigitalOcean simply does everything the right way I wanted it to.
The payment options, the selection of servers, the simple UI and all the well-written tutorials have convinced me.

Last but not least, they will give you a 100$ credit if you create an account after clicking this link.

Conclusion 😎

I learned a lot. From finding an idea over to planning and working on it. I have learned, how to break up the big steps in smaller ones, using the Kanban board to track my progress and stay motivated.

Finishing and releasing a project feels rewarding. Everything you code should be released to the public in some way.

Only then, writing code makes sense.

If you want to follow me in some way on Twitter or Instagram, just do it. You will get some further updates about the development of ServerMonitor in the future and also other interesting topics.

I would be happy to talk to you about every tech-related topic on Twitter, Instagram or here on dev.to.

Thanks for reading and happy coding!

Binge watching random tutorials is a waste of time!

Christian Lutz — Sun, 14 Apr 2019 19:34:19 +0000

A lot of people try to learn programming trough reading a book from cover to cover, attending boot camps or watching endless tutorials.

This approach can help you to get some knowledge, but most of the time you learn way less as you have hoped.

If you really want to learn to code, there is only one right way to do it:
Find or create a real project, you can work on!

Why is this approach to learning programming a lot better?
In contrast to tutorials or programming books, you will get at some time to a point where you have to find a solution for a problem you can't solve yet.
To get ahead with your project, you have to find a solution to this problem.
Now, you're in a situation where you will learn more about programming and problem solving as if you read through 100 books or watching random tutorials.

You work with your code and you search for solutions to a real problem.

Everything you have truly learned in your lifetime, you only have learned because you did it.
Reading through a book or watching random tutorials without directly using the information bring you some information about the topic but you learn nothing.

It's like watching someone is riding a bike.
You may know how to do it: Step into the pedals and not falling off.
But you don't know how to do it and why it's correct in this or a different way.

Thanks for reading.

Getting started with Flask - "Hello World Wide Web!"

Christian Lutz — Sun, 07 Apr 2019 20:24:32 +0000

Creating web apps is possibly one of the coolest things you could do in your lifetime. ;)
The reasons are obvious.
You can create something meaningful, everyone can use.

With some work, you may be creating something like this:

Follow me to get more information about the ServerMonitor in the near future.

Let's get started!

Introduction

Flask is a lightweight Python web framework based on Werkzeug and Jinja2.
Lightweight means, Flask only has the most basic features to create your web application on your own.
Everything other like admin panels, for example, have to be built from scratch, unlike in Django.

For starting out in web development with Python, this makes a lot of sense.
You don't have to learn a lot of framework stuff before you can build a web app.

Create your project

Make a folder where your Flask project should be located.
You can do this in CMD on Windows.

mkdir flask_project

Then, open your created folder with:

cd flask_project

Installation

Installing flask via PIP is quite easy.
Simply type...

pip install Flask

...to install the Flask module.

Setting up the application

After installing Flask, we have to make a Python file.
I will call it 'main.py'

This file will contain all of the basic code for Flask to run.

from flask import Flask
app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route("/")
def hello_www():
    return "Hello World Wide Web!"

Code explanation

First of all, we import our installed Flask module from Flask with:

from flask import Flask

Then, we define the variable 'app' and assign "Flask(_ name _)" to it:

app = Flask(__name__)

After that, we can create our first route with:

@app.route("/")

To make it work, we need some return value, that will be displayed on our web page.

For that, we type:

def hello_www():
    return "Hello World Wide Web!"

Last but not least, we will return a String with "Hello World Wide Web!".

Run your application

After we have created and saved our code, we want to see the result.
For that, you first need to define your Python file for Flask in this way:

set FLASK_APP=main.py

If this is done, you can start your web app with:

flask run

Go to http://localhost:5000 or http://127.0.0.1:5000, to see your result:

Congratulations!
You have created your first web app.

If you want to dive deeper into the Flask-World, visit http://flask.pocoo.org/.