Building a Python Application: Course Two-0daytown

Description
This course is the second course in two-part series on how to build an application in Python. In the first course, we built a data ingestion process that extracted named entities from articles across a few different publications. We extracted named entities from around 100,000 articles and we saved the results into Cloud Firestore. In this second course, we’ll explore the codebase for a web application used to visualize those results.

We’ll kick off the course by checking out some quality of life changes implemented while developing this app. That includes a custom bash theme, a replacement debugger, a debugger command for starting an IPython shell, and pytest plugins. After that, we’re going to review the data access layer and its accompanying tests. That’s going to include multiple implementations of each data access service. Then we’ll check out Python’s web application standard.

Next, we’ll review the web application layer and its accompanying tests. That’s going to include a fast web application framework, custom middleware, request hooks, and application configuration. After that, we’re going to review the presentation layer, including a Vue.js app and materialize CSS. Finally, we’re going to run the app locally and trace some requests through the application using the debugger.

Learning Objectives
Implement a few developer quality of life changes
Implement a testable data access layer
Understand how a Python web app operates
Understand how to build and test a more complex web app
Understand how to use ipdb and IPython

Intended Audience
This course is intended for software developers or anyone who wants to learn more about building apps with Python.

Prerequisites
Before taking this course, please make sure you have taken the first course in this two-part series: Building a Python Application: Course One
You should also have an understanding of Python 3, Linux CLI, HTML/JS, and Git

Resources
The source code for the course is available on GitHub.

Building a Python Application: Course Two