RE: Introducing the hackjohn bot for southbound John Muir Trail permits

[emrebeyler]

Great post to define the problem and the challenge, as well as the finding the solution.

The check about the pandas version is a great touch.

I used cron, which despite its awful interface got the job done.

Can't agree. Crontab's interface is amazing and works very well in comparison to hipster solutions. :)

I would also like to see a installation instruction without conda. (Packacing it with setup.py or at least a requirements.txt) Conda is not a industry standard yet, I code with Python almost ten years, never used it.)

Also, reading the configurational variables outside of the logic may be good for other people. (Ex: environment variables.)

It's a minor thing but looks like you also have a redundant variable call here.

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Comments

[dhimmel]

Thanks @emrebeyler for the thorough and helpful review. Much appreciated.

I would also like to see a installation instruction without conda.

I added support for virtual environment with pip installation of requirements.txt in this commit. I usually work on scientific computing projects where there are more heavyweight dependencies, often written in other languages then Python, so conda makes the most sense. But here the dependencies are all Python and virtual env does a fantastic job.

I did consider making the script into more a package... e.g. adding setup.py and making it a command line utility with argparse argument parsing. However, I reckoned that many users will need to modify the source code to suit their custom needs and at this point the added complexity would be more of a barrier to customization.

Crontab's interface is amazing and works very well in comparison to hipster solutions. :)

My gripe is that I have trouble remember what the following cron config means:

19 15 * * * 

Also placing minutes before hours seems wrong.

looks like you also have a redundant variable call here.

Remnant from when I was writing this code in Jupyter notebook cells!

[utopian-io]

Thank you for your review, @emrebeyler! Keep up the good work!