There are a lot of introductory programming resources available. There are a lot of advanced programming resources available as well. But the in-between is a really tough area. You are either introducing new concepts, which can be a bit trivial or boring (a lot of people have already read the webpage). Or you need very tough, specific, real world circumstances which involve a lot of context that doesn't apply to many people's needs.
So why not build a simple application from the ground up, using trivial straight forward concepts. At the same time ramble on about the more advanced ideas you might encounter in the future. Plan for those ideas in this simple application.
Ideally the problem domain will never interfere with understanding the technical challenges. This makes it easy to focus on techniques without getting drowned in details.
Prevailing wisdom tells us not to optimize our applications prematurely. While this is correct, it falls into one of those arguable contextual problems we all see when theory hits reality. Just because our site isn't in production doesn't mean we can use a weak password hash. Even though we don't have any data, we should still think a little about our database indexes and relationships.
There are a few items we will assume to be true for this application. We will focus on these items early on:
- We want to have multiple developers on a project
- We want to test our code
- We want to effectively find and fix bugs. Proactively when possible.
With these assumptions in mind, we will be focusing on aspects of development which may not seem appropriate given the state of the application.
The goal for these iterations is not to simply build another demo Flask application. The goal is to establish good development habits for larger projects.
In the first iteration we have a very simple business application. So simple, in fact, that it won't even run. When we import our config file, it doesn't exist. Keeping the configuration file out of source control is very important for security. Config files have things like API keys and database passwords in them. When bringing on new developers, or if you project is public, you don't need to release your secret keys to the world.
We will keep a template version of our config file. This will give new developers something to copy locally, while keeping our secrets hidden.