Second day at Hacker School. I spent the morning doing two things:

• getting my blog setup to use Octopress.
• helping another HS-er troubleshoot getting setup with Flask and Flaskr.

Yesterday, I was super frustrated by the difficulties I had in getting Octopress going, and was reminded of the frustrations with setting up Ruby environments that led me to wipe my computer and start from scratch a few weeks ago. You know, that and a certain amount of boredom.

Anyhow, I was able to make more headway today, largely because I sorted out all of the really silly stuff yesterday.

But helping Sammy with setting up Flask was a nightmare! TL;DR, we figured it out, and it was incredibly simple.

First off, there were some minor SNAFU’s with me showing her about [virtualenv], and explaining briefly how it works and how why she should use it. But then, we were confronted with these instructions on the Flaskr doc page on Github, a natural place to look when the “actual” docs don’t mention anything about how to install or setup the damn thing.

We spent nearly two and a half hours searching for the mythical flask binary, to no avail. Finally, after I inadvertently ran aacross this flask issue, it dawned on me that we might be having the same problem. Well, that’s not quite true. In reality, I got so frustrated that I decided to just try the simplest thing that I could think of to get flaskr to run python flaskr.py. Low and behold, it worked!! Then, in retrospect, having seen that issue describing the disconnect between the docs for flaskr in the flask master branch and what the latest stable version was, I went and looked at the last stable release docs for Flaskr, and there it was. Simple instructions to do the simple, straightforward thing.

[[virtualenv]: http://virtualenv.readthedocs.org/en/latest/virtualenv.html