Newspaper-Bill-Calculator-v2 VS npbc

later on, I began a project to calculate our monthly newspaper bill (https://github.com/eccentricOrange/Newspaper-Bill-Calculator-v2, archived) and it forced me to think and learn a lot about things like the structure of the project, file I/O, UX etc. all real-world skills (and that happened because the project was going to be used by real-world people)

The other important goal was to be a testbed for learning a bunch of new tools: more Python libraries, SQL connectors, GitHub Actions (CI/CD, if I understand correctly), unit tests, CLI libraries, type-hinting, regex. I had earlier built this on a different platform, so I now have a solid idea of how this application is used.

For the past four years, I've maintained an application that is useful to my family. I learnt a lot about UI/UX, LabVIEW, and file I/O with this. Now, I'm rewriting and expanding it with Python, and using it as an opportunity to learn about: database connectors, HTML/CSS/JS trio and stuff like Flask, APIs, CLIs, CI/CD etc. This approach works well too.

Well, there will probably be problems in your life that have a programming solution. For example, we subscribe to something like 5 newspapers billed monthly but with different prices per paper per weekday. We verify the vendor's calculations and it's bit of a chore. Perfect thing to automate with a script!

Another good example is command line arguments. I got started with argv and argc and wrote a rudimentary application with that. At some point I decided to migrate it to Python, and continued to use sys.argv there. Now, we (family) rely on that application, and I use argparse (Python) most of the time. In the context of this application, I'm currently learning about deployment and distribution (hence you'll find my makeshift "installation" instructions in the README). Once I figure that out, I'll switch to a existing tried and tested system.

I'm currently on a new version of the newspaper bill calculator (https://github.com/eccentricOrange/npbc) and it's still teaching me tons (more file i/o, good/bad practices, databases, regex, CI/CD, different kinds of UI like CLIs etc etc)...

The primary purpose of this project is for me to learn to use Flask. It usually takes me 4-5 ~rewrites~ revisions of a project to make it have some structure, and this one is only in v2. I've also had to learn a lot of stuff (Flask, virtually all of JS, some 80% of the CSS, the whole concept of a front- and back-end being split between a CLI and a browser, datetime module), so it's been somewhat tough to build as well. I don't always code like this.

The full codebase is available. At this point, I've completed most of the changes I need to make to the actual code, and push it to GitHub. https://github.com/eccentricOrange/npbc/tree/5c529dacbef0f9a1f8915a49dcca47834204aa09

Link: https://github.com/eccentricOrange/npbc/tree/efd5f37b82a42437a9ed0d61d20a8455dce6f0e0

This post is not a request for review, but if you want to get a sense of the size/number of files, here is a GitHub repo at a specific commit (so that all discussion is consistent). Is it okay to make a post requesting a review of this code? If not, do you know a place I could request someone to take a look?

Make sure that the "complex" problem you're solving is the same as your end goal. That's my main motivator: if I need an app to calculate newspaper bills, I need it. Learning about OOP (for example) outside of a problem where I really benefit from having it doesn't work so well for me.