normalize publishing the filthiest of personal project source code repos

let’s write shitty code together
let’s relearn having innocent fun toying with computers

your hobby space is not your resume

@mia You would absolutely positively shudder at my python and QT monstrosity which I built to have a program that calculates character sheet for a niche TRPG. But it works correctly atleast. Very proud of what I managed

@stefan i’d shudder if you had used wxpython

@mia I almost ended up using TKinter for the GUI but it was just shit to use. Why is this recommended for python again?

Tbh QT-Designer made the GUI-Part somewhat easer but coding part more difficult

@stefan if you want to do modern qt stuff you can probably do the whole thing in pure QML and just run that through the qml interpreter

it sounds like most of what you’re doing there can be done declaratively, with only a small amount of scripting

@stefan recommend looking into qtquick instead of the old designer stuff either way, it’s super super nice

@mia i dunno actually. Like I have no clue. It was what worked for and the GUI is responsive (other than TKInter which would bog down really quickly)

There is so many horrors lurking in the code just cause I do not know any better and have no real clue of python lol. Pretty sure there is literally thousands of lines that could be replaced but it works and fast even

This is my atrocity: https://codeberg.org/stefan230/Konosuba-TRPG-Character-Sheet-Program Still proud of it.

And everything is better than the LibreOffice Calc sheet I had before

@stefan oh, yeah, that would be way easier and prettier with qml! maybe you could look into it when you’re bored

@mia Maybe if I have the time and boredom to look at it. For now it works well and does correct math

@mia The next I wanted to tackle for a long while is building a scraper thingie to grab some useful data of of publishers Websites when it comes to Light Novel.

The first try kinda worked but getting the data in shape was much manual labour

@mia Or at least if you write shitty code… not corporate-shitty.

@mia oh baby it's my time to shine

@stefan sounds fun though. and thank god beautifulsoup exists

something you can try as well is a search engine user agent; sometimes they serve things in more easily processed formats to those

@stefan also fwiw some publishers might actually be happy to help you get that data because it’s good for PR

i barely even remember the details anymore but my team lead at CR once asked me if i could write some API for a news site/blog to fetch things like series metadata from. so because i’m just a freelancer and not authorized to work with the backend directly, i basically wrote a scraper lol

@stefan was kinda sketchy too because it ran on one of my personal domains. a lot of PR stuff was only semi-official back in the old days.

@mia Yeah tbh I should really ask them for the data. Thats a good point. J-Novel Club has an API to get all that info so that was a piece of cake for a contributor lol.

So I guess just straight up asking the likes of Yen Press and Seven Seas might not end to bad.

The idea was just to grab the data and then donate that to inventaire. I would have tried openLibrary first but they only really have a mailing list if you want to ask stuff so....

I do have quite a lot of stuff already atleast: https://codeberg.org/stefan230/Light-Novel-Database

@stefan hey actually if you want i can ask my colleagues at CR about it, there’s a good chance some of them have contacts or are directly involved with the tech side of some german publishers

@mia You could really do that for me? That might help me out maybe. All I wanted to accomplish was to have a high quality database for Light Novels so it could be used with fedi stuff like bookwyrm. So idea was to contribute to an open dataset

@stefan i brought it up in one of our chats. wouldn’t expect much, but it’s worth a try i think

maybe you could also try to reach out to publishers at events like LBM? might have a better chance at getting to the right people than via email or something

@mia I will certainly not be at LBM sadly. But tbh my most concern is not even the german publishers tbh. They do not offer that many Novels so one could feaseably add the data by hand.

The english ones are a different story though.

@mia sooo... when i was 17 or so, a bunch of frens and I used to gather at someone's apartment with some drinks and laptops, and write code while getting shitfaced drunk. In the morning, we'd tar it without looking and send to corresponding open source projects. A few times we even were thanked for fixing something, but more often than not we were blocked for abuse.

@mia true! tired of ppl being like “i wont release the source code because it sucks”

@cobra @mia my shitty code ended up on musicbrainz picard, sorta. someone had to edit it to fix a bug and i felt sorry for them lol

@Flaky @cobra my shitty code became a popular general-purpose temp file hoster, and a very popular pastebin alternative

@mia @Flaky hey i host an instance of that