Tom Ballinger thomasballinger

Let's build a Bitly Clone!

Bitly is a url shortening service. Building a url shortener is a common interview question / take home project, because it's a minimal project that involves many aspects of web development. Build a website that allows you to submit a link, then gives you a new, hopefully shorter url to use for that link.

Advice and motivation

Typically at Hacker School understanding is emphasized over ability to throw things together - this is an exercise in the latter. It's also practice reading documentation to figure out how to do things quickly, and a guided way to gain exposure to web development concepts that you might research more after this sprint today. It reminds me (in good and bad ways) of a hackathon.

Recursion day

Talk to other people - this didn't happen enough last week! Many people are already good at using recursion, and but would still learn something by working through problems with you. Consider describing your strategy before actually implementing it. Try doing this on a whiteboard.

Some resource to come back to later:

The little schemer - a mindbending intro to programming and recursion
SICP section 1.2 - you might need to read 1.1 to get up to speed
Add some more! Is there a MOOC you really like the recursion section of, or a textbook that gives it a nice treatment? Add it on Zulip and I'll add it here.

	from twisted.python import log
	from sys import stdout
	log.startLogging(stdout)

	from twisted.internet.protocol import Protocol, Factory

	VisualizerClient.update_everybody()

	class VisualizerClient(object):
	clients = []



	>>> wrap('hello there', 5)
	['hello',
	'there']
	>>> wrap('home is where the heartwrenching angst is', 10)
	['home is',
	'where a',
	'heartwrenc', #1
	'hing',

	#!/usr/bin/env python

	import sys
	import urllib2
	import json

	def do_gist_json(s):
	""" Use json to post to github. """
	gist_public = False
	gist_url = 'https://api.github.com/gists'

	#!/usr/bin/env python

	import sys
	import urllib
	import webbrowser

	def get_opt_url(s, from_bpython=True):
	""" Use json to post to github. """

	if from_bpython:

	require 'rspec'
	require 'forwardable'
	require 'pry'
	require 'set'

	class ListyThing
	extend Forwardable
	def_delegators :@data, :<<, :empty?, :concat
	def initialize
	@data = []



	mkfifo inpipe
	mkfifo outpipe
	$ python ai.py < inpipe > outpipe &; node client.js < outpipe > inpipe

	autoload compinit
	compinit
	autoload bashcompinit
	bashcompinit
	complete -C 'tu --get-bash-completion' tu

	import random
	import bisect
	import math
	from matplotlib import pyplot


	def points(n):
	return [(random.random(), random.random()) for _ in range(n)]

	def random_path(n):