Parsing Javascript and APIs with ChompJS and JMESPath

I just published a new webscraping video – Parsing Javascript and APIs with ChompJS and JMESPath. Check it out below!

I’ve been really enjoying making video/streaming content like this, if you want to see more of this kind of content please like/subscribe on Youtube/follow me on Twitch.

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Getting Names Of Your Patreon Patrons From The Patreon API

A common Patreon reward is to list patron names in the credits for your creations – on my patreon I have this on any tier more than €3. In order to implement this I used the patreon api python package so I could have it look up names automatically when people view my bot credits. Compared to other API packages I found it quite awkward to use, so figured it would be worthwhile to write up a guide on how to use it.

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Patreon Announcement + Dicecord-CoD Prefix Update

I’m excited to announce that I am on Patreon now! If you want to support any of my current or future projects please pop by! I’m hoping I can use this to offset my Dicecord/blog hosting costs, as well as help fund some video tutorials.

In addition, I have updated Dicecord-CoD with a long awaited feature: custom prefixes. Read on for the full changelog.
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Scrapy-GUI updated to version 1.1

I’ve just updated Scrapy-GUI to version 1.1.

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Using Scrapy-GUI In Your Scrapy Shell

I spent my Christmas break working on my first python package – Scrapy-GUI. This package is an addon for the scrapy shell that gives you a graphical user interface for writing and testing scrapy queries and processors. This blog is going to focus on how the tools tab works and how you can utilise it to help build your scrapy web spiders.

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Are your selectors not returning expected content when webscraping?

I’ve taken a shine to posting on the /r/learnpython subreddit recently and I have a noticed a trend over the last few days – quite a lot of people seem to be using the Holiday break to learn how to webscrape and are coming upon the same problem: they’ve checked the html of a website in their browser to find the info they want, constructed a perfectly acceptable selector but it isn’t returning anything! I decided to write up a quick tutorial that I can link instead of having to answer the question every time.

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I got a QR Code Tattoo!

I got my first ever tattoo this week. This is something I had been considering for a long while – about 5 years. I wanted something that reflected my obsession with technology, something that looked cool but also had a function. If you’ve already read the title, you’ll know that I settled on a QR code.

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ELI5 Tutorial: Unit Testing with unittest

I lied in my last post. I have decided to do one more ELI5, this time for Unit Tests. I decided to do this to help my classmates – Google is running a code retreat tomorrow at my university and advised participants to be prepared to work with unit tests but many of my classmates haven’t worked with them before. I figured I’d help them out by giving a very quick introduction to the package and giving a basic template.

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ELI5 Tutorial: Subclassing Objects in Python

So, this ELI5 has been sitting in my drafts folder for a while. Not sure how that happened there! Woops! After some delay, here is the final EL15 for now – how to subclass an object!

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Connecting to Eduroam on Linux

Today I returned to university to do a postgrad after an 11 year absence. A lot had changed since my undergrad, mostly on the tech support side. My student webmail is on gmail now, printing costs money and WiFi is managed by something called Eduroam. This last point caused me some trouble on my first day since my work laptop runs Linux (ubuntu 16.04) which meant I had to change some settings to make it connect. Since Eduroam is used in a bunch of institutions the world over there is plenty of random blog posts and help pages filled by students who have been in a similar position. However, as with a lot of software of this nature, updates between blog posts have resulted in out of date advice. After some finagling I was able to get it working and I’ve decided to join in the tradition of giving Eduroam help on blog posts by posting my own advice. Here is how to set up Eduroam on Linux in 2019.

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