Mundane Programming. Or: How to Program for Tomorrow.

Mundane Programming is a collection of thoughts and guides on how to program for today, and how to program for tomorrow.

By tomorrow, I don’t mean the Tomorrow of Our Children’s Future-kind-of-tomorrow. I mean, literally, tomorrow. As in, when you wake up tomorrow morning, what can you program while drinking your first cup of coffee? Or during your lunch break, or as part of your normally non-programming job?

The target audience for Mundane Programming is novice and intermediate aspiring programmers who aren’t yet professional programmers.

Feel free to make comments or edits to this site’s Github repo: mundaneprogramming/mundaneprogramming.github.io

The topic of Mundane Programming was proposed for a session at SRCCON 2015 and presented by Dan Nguyen and Geoff Hing . You can see the slides here.

Under construction

This site was meant as a repository for code examples we wanted to show, so that people didn't feel the need to frantically copy recipes or code snippets during the SRCCON presentation. However, it wasn't quite organized and polished in time. You're free to peruse the code so far, but keep in mind that they haven't been given a full (or any) explanation yet.

Example Recipes and Projects

Combining text files

In many real world situations, data is not only dirty, it's not even put together in a single file.

Get metadata about a Socrata dataset

Get the most important information about a Socrata dataset.

Get coordinate data from Google Geocoding

Get latitude and longitude, and other Google geodata, for any given location.

Finding text within a group of images

You remember documenting a website by taking screenshots. But how do you search by text?

Automated webpage screenshots with PhantomJS

The problem with non-browser tools is that, well, they don't act like browsers. "Headless" programs provide some of the functionality of a full-fledged web browser for automated systems (such as testing, or mass screenshot grabbing)

Get data about an Instagram photo

Another example of doing something you've already done -- finding the information about a photo -- but doing it via API

Dummy text detector

Do a last-second sweep of embarrassing words and phrases

Fetch latest updates on Texas death row

An exercise in scraping and parsing HTML about criminal justice events.

Timestamp and organize downloaded files

Not quite as good as git, but better than hand-naming files yourself.

See all the examples.