The finished (though I’ll add to it overtime) product is available here: https://www.acarrick.com/urban_stats

After I make those changes to acarrick.com based on the suggestions from Lighthouse, I apparently broke the JavaScript by adding the async attribute to the jQuery script tag. The animated scrolling and the text hiding link no longer worked due to “$ is not defined”.

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I’ve been involving myself in a few projects lately, for both work and personal life. During these projects, I’ve been thinking about what tools and technologies I use, and to use while I’m in the planning process. I’d like to share some of these.

Updated: 29th March 2018 – Git Bash for Mac

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Recently I heard about Chrome’s Lighthouse extension for auditing websites and web apps. Lighthouse analyses websites for a few key metrics and suggesting ways they can be improved if needed. These include:

• Progressive Web app improvements
• Performance
• Accessibility
• Best Practises

While I don’t currently build web applications, I think it’s still a good test to use to find where improvements could be made, even so, I’ll learn something for the future.

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Background

Because of the way the prerequisites were entered into the course websites, I needed to write a little function parse strings such as “INFS1200 + GEOM1100 + 1200 + 1300″. In English, we know that 1200 and 1300 refer to GEOM1200 and GEOM1300 but that was assumed so left off. However, I needed to create a List object with the course codes themselves. So after I use list.split() on the string, I iterated over the list and the letters of the previous element to any current element that consists only of digits.

My little function was fine while I could list = string.split(” + “), but this breaks down when you discover that sometimes they are entered as “INFS1200 or GEOM1100 and 1200 & 1300” or something equally inconsistent.

Improvements

So it was time to learn RegEx! And therefore re-write the function in a more generic way. I needed to find any string that consisted of 4 uppercase letters followed by 4 digits or 2 uppercase letters followed by 4 digits, putting each result into the list.

After some searching and experimentation, I found that (simple) RegEx wasn’t as difficult as I thought and kind of fun. I used the following:

[A-Z]{4}[0-9]{4} | [A-Z]{2}[0-9]{4} | [0-9]{4}r

This works well and means I don’t have to worry how they separate the course codes. After adding the course codes to the list, I then iterate over it to fix the missing subject matter letters (INFS or GEOM etc).