Alright, so today I’m gonna walk you through my dive into Elliot Thomas’ stuff. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, finally got around to it.
First off, I started by just googling “Elliot Thomas”. Pretty basic, right? I needed to see what’s out there, get a feel for what people are talking about. Scrolled through a bunch of links, mostly GitHub stuff. Seemed like a good place to start digging.
GitHub Dive: I hopped over to the first GitHub link that looked promising. It was a repo with a bunch of scripts and tools. I’m not gonna lie, the initial look was a bit overwhelming. Code everywhere! But I decided to clone the repo to my local machine. Gotta get my hands dirty, right?
git clone [repo url]– Bam! Done.
Once it was cloned, I started going through the files, one by one. Readme first, always! It gave a general overview of what the project was about. Okay, cool. Then I started opening up the scripts. Python, mostly. Some shell scripts too. I tried running a few of them, just to see what would happen.
Some scripts worked right away, others needed some tweaking. Missing dependencies, that kind of thing. I used pip install [missing package] a lot. That’s coding, ain’t it?
I spent a good chunk of time just figuring out what each script was supposed to do. Commenting was… sparse. So, lots of reading and trying to understand the logic. Debugging by printing stuff to the console. Old school, but it works.
Modified a Script: I found one script that was almost what I needed. It did one thing great, but missed a crucial step. So, I decided to modify it. Opened it up in my editor, started hacking away. I added a new function, tweaked some existing ones. Lots of trial and error. Broke it a couple of times, but eventually got it working.
Testing and Iteration: Testing is key, right? I created some test data and ran the script against it. Watched the output like a hawk. Found some bugs, fixed ’em. Reran the tests. Rinse and repeat until I was satisfied.
Learnings: What did I learn from all this? Well, Elliot Thomas seems to know their stuff. The code was well-structured, even if it wasn’t heavily commented. I picked up some new Python tricks, especially around data manipulation. And I got a better understanding of how to approach a new codebase. Don’t be afraid to dive in, experiment, and break things. That’s how you learn!
Overall, a pretty solid experience. Would definitely recommend checking out Elliot Thomas’ work if you’re into this kind of thing.
