Last week, during office hours, I shared the two libraries that were my gateways to learning Python.

Cog

I stumbled on Ned Batchelder’s Cog while running an ISP in SWMO in the mid-00s. At the time, I was writing lots of PHP code and had a few layers of ORM code that I could generate with Cog’s help. This code was mainly boilerplate, and Cog was great at templating code. Thankfully, I didn’t need to know Python with Cog to make it work.

In recent years, I have still used Cog to update docs and to document Justfiles, Click, Typer, and console apps by grabbing the output and embedding it into docs.

Beautiful Soup

Beautiful Soup is the library that pushed me to learn Python. Beautiful Soup motivated me to learn Python and even more advanced feats like installing LXML and processing unparseable HTML or XML. I have always liked writing web scrapers and processing HTML documents, which is a weird hobby of mine.

My first Python app

My friends and I worked in our first post-college dot com job, and Dell was running an incredible deal on their 20" widescreen monitors over the Christmas holiday.

Dell ran a daily Dell Elf (Delf) contest where you gave them your email address, and they would give you a discount code for their various products.

The best code was 50% off of their 20" widescreen displays, which was an incredible deal then. The display retailed for $499, so getting one for $249.50 was great. These codes were random, and the odds were 1 in 25 to get one.

Using Python and having an email catchall, I wrote my first script to submit a series of email addresses until we found the daily 50% off code. At least four or five of my friends and I stocked up on these monitors that fall, and I have been a fan of Dell displays ever since.

Today

I still use Cog and Beautiful Soup 4 in several projects, including a few daily drivers. Last year, during their end-of-year sale, I picked three Dell 27-inch displays, and I still have fond memories of Dell’s displays.