Okay, so today I wanna share my experience messin’ around with “tracy cunningham”. Heard about it somewhere, can’t remember exactly where, but it sounded interesting enough to give it a shot.
First thing I did was fire up my usual dev environment. I’m using VS Code, got all my plugins set up just the way I like ’em. I figured, “Alright, let’s see what this tracy cunningham thing is all about.”
Started by googling “tracy cunningham github” – always a good place to start, right? Found a repo that looked promising. README wasn’t the greatest, but hey, that’s the story of my life. I cloned it down, took a peek at the code.
Right off the bat, I was a little confused. The structure wasn’t what I expected. Lots of files and folders, but not a whole lot of explanation. So, I did what any self-respecting coder would do – started poking around. Opened a few files, tried to get a feel for how things were connected.
There was this one file, , that seemed like the entry point. I ran it. Nothing. Well, not nothing, but it threw an error. Some missing dependency, some weird library I’d never heard of. Typical.
So, I copied the error message, pasted it into Google. Stack Overflow to the rescue! Turns out, I needed to install a specific version of this library, like, really specific. Did that. Ran it again. Another error. Sigh.
This time, the error was different. Something about environment variables not being set. Okay, I can handle that. Opened up my .env file, started adding the variables it was complaining about. Had to guess at the values for some of them, but hey, gotta start somewhere, right?
Ran it again. And… success! Sort of. It printed some stuff to the console, looked like it was working. But then it just stopped. No output, no errors, just… silence.
Okay, time to debug. I threw in some print() statements all over the place, trying to figure out where it was getting stuck. Turns out, there was a loop that was going on forever. Some condition wasn’t being met, and it was just spinning its wheels.
After staring at the code for way too long, I finally realized what was happening. The loop was waiting for some external event, something that was supposed to happen, but wasn’t. I dug around some more, found a configuration file that controlled this event. Tweaked a setting, saved the file.
Ran it again. This time, the loop finished. It moved on to the next stage. More output, more progress. It was actually doing something! I was feeling pretty good about myself at this point.
But then… another error. This time, it was a permissions issue. Something about not being able to write to a certain directory. Okay, easy fix. sudo chmod -R 777 that directory. I know, I know, not the best practice, but I was just trying to get it working, alright?
Ran it again. And… it worked! Finally! It ran all the way through, produced some output files. I opened them up, and… it was actually pretty cool. It had taken some input data, processed it, and generated some visualizations. Not exactly sure why I would use it, but it was impressive nonetheless.
- Cloned the repo from GitHub.
- Struggled with dependencies and environment variables.
- Debugged a infinite loop.
- Fixed a permissions issue with a quick and dirty chmod.
- Finally got it running and generating output.
So, yeah, that was my experience with “tracy cunningham”. It was a bit of a pain in the ass, to be honest. But I learned a few things along the way. And hey, at least I got it working in the end. Sometimes, that’s all that matters.
Would I recommend it? Maybe. If you’re looking for a challenge and you don’t mind spending some time debugging, then go for it. But be prepared to get your hands dirty.
