The Prototype that Lived Forever

This is the story of a simple webapp that came into the world to answer a simple question. It was the result of a three day bender, that ended in a frenzied last minute deployment onto Heroku. The question it answered was this:

what do student submissions at DataCamp look like?

At the time, I was working on different ways of representing code, and wanted to see how a common way of breaking down code, Abstract Syntax Trees, would work for pulling insights for different python courses.

Why is diff-viewer still living a fruitful life? #

• I was able to take advantage of pydocumentdb
• As it turns out, thumbing through code submissions yields surprising results
• Figuring out how to query documentdb from R is just inconvenient enough that people at work have used diff-viewer as an API for that database.

What does it all mean? #

I think a lot about diff-viewer. I think because