Learning in Public: Exploring the BT iPay API

Dan Luu and Jamie Brandon have argued quite successfully that increasing your productivity and velocity as a developer can lead to good return on investment. So I've been thinking about doing the same and I was inspired by Michael Lynch to record myself while coding and then to analyze the mistakes I've made.

That was quite fun and I got some very useful feedback from it, so I thought I'd share this video, as a way of learning in public.

First lesson: my green screen doesn't play nice with my IKEA chair that has a mesh in the back. My apologies for the awful looking webcam overlay.

And some development lessons:

• I go with the mouse several times to the menu to select "Format code". I should learn the shortcut for that, or even better, I should set PyCharm to auto format the file when saving.
• I spent a lot of time on figuring out the parameters for the first call and on formatting them as a dictionary. I could have sped up understanding how to send the parameters by URL decoding the provided example and for the formatting I could have used a multi cursor for quicker editing.
• BurpSuite/HTTP Toolkit was recommended as a way to explore HTTP APIs.
• When I was writing the client.register_payment call I had to hover a lot over the function definition to see the order of parameters. Copying the function definition would have been faster and it would have made it easier to define keyword arguments, which are clearer for a function with so many parameters.

Thas was quite fun and useful. Thank you Michael and Catalin for the feedback!