Alright folks, let me tell you about this little thing I’ve been tinkering with called “soball.” It’s nothing fancy, just a fun side project I kicked off a while back.
It all started when I was messing around with some data. I had this huge pile of info, and I needed a way to sort of, you know, roll it up into something manageable. I was thinking, “There’s gotta be a better way than the usual spreadsheets and scripts.”
So, I decided to build something myself. I started by sketching out a basic design. I wanted it to be simple: input the data, define some rules, and bam, out comes the aggregated results. I used Python for the backend because, well, it’s my go-to for quick and dirty projects. Plus, all those libraries are super handy.
The first version was rough, real rough. I mean, it barely worked. But hey, it was a start! I could feed it data, and it would sort of do what I wanted. The UI was basically a command-line interface (CLI), not pretty, but functional.
Next, I focused on the rules engine. This was the tricky part. I wanted users to be able to define their own aggregation logic without having to write code. So, I ended up using a simple configuration file format. Think YAML, but even more basic. It allowed users to specify which fields to group by, which fields to sum, average, etc.
Then came the UI. I knew the CLI wasn’t gonna cut it for anyone but me. I decided to go with a web interface. Used Flask as the framework. I learned some basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and whipped up a decent front-end. It ain’t gonna win any design awards, but it’s user-friendly enough. I built the UI to allow user to drag and drop features where needed.
After that, I started adding features, like data validation, error handling, and better reporting. Also optimized the aggregation algorithms so that it could handle larger datasets without choking. It was a lot of trial and error, a lot of debugging, and a whole lot of Googling.
What did I learn? Plenty! I re-learned a lot about Python, and got my hands dirty with web development. Plus, I now have a tool that I use all the time for analyzing data.
And that’s “soball” in a nutshell. It’s not perfect, but it’s mine. And who knows, maybe someone else will find it useful too.
