🧪 Practice: Ecosystem

The full professional workflow, end to end: venv → packages → Git → API call. This is the setup ritual you’ll perform for every real project for the rest of your career. Do it with your own hands — this one’s mostly doing, less reading.

Exercise 1 — The project ritual (do it for real)

Create a project called eco-practice with the complete professional setup:

# 1. Create the folder and enter it
# 2. Create a virtual environment
# 3. Activate it
# 4. Install requests
# 5. Freeze requirements.txt
# 6. Verify: pip list shows requests inside YOUR venv

Exercise 2 — The Git layer

Initialize a Git repo in eco-practice, create a .gitignore (exclude .venv/), make your first commit, and confirm git status is clean.

Exercise 3 — The API call

Inside the project, write main.py that fetches a random useless fact from this free API (no key needed):

API: https://uselessfacts.jsph.pl/api/v2/facts/random

Print just the fact’s text. Handle: network failure, and a missing “text” key.

Exercise 4 — The retry wrapper

Wrap your API call in a function get_fact(retries=3) that tries up to 3 times before giving up, printing “Attempt X failed” between tries.

Exercise 5 — Persist the facts

Every fact fetched gets saved to facts.json (a list that grows across runs). Run the script 3 times — the file should hold 3 facts.

Solutions

Exercise 1 — the ritual:

mkdir eco-practice
cd eco-practice
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate        # Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate
pip install requests
pip freeze > requirements.txt
pip list                          # confirm requests is there

Exercise 2:

git init
# create .gitignore containing:  .venv/
git add .
git commit -m "Initial setup with requests"
git status        # clean

Exercise 3 — main.py:

import requests

try:
    response = requests.get(
        "https://uselessfacts.jsph.pl/api/v2/facts/random",
        timeout=10,
    )
    response.raise_for_status()
    data = response.json()
    print(data.get("text", "No text available"))
except requests.exceptions.RequestException as err:
    print(f"Network problem: {err}")

Exercise 4:

import requests

def get_fact(retries=3):
    for attempt in range(1, retries + 1):
        try:
            response = requests.get(
                "https://uselessfacts.jsph.pl/api/v2/facts/random",
                timeout=10,
            )
            response.raise_for_status()
            return response.json().get("text")
        except requests.exceptions.RequestException as err:
            print(f"Attempt {attempt} failed: {err}")
    return None

fact = get_fact()
print(fact or "All attempts failed")

Exercise 5:

import json
import os

FILE = "facts.json"

facts = []
if os.path.exists(FILE):
    with open(FILE) as f:
        facts = json.load(f)

fact = get_fact()          # the function from Exercise 4
if fact:
    facts.append(fact)
    with open(FILE, "w") as f:
        json.dump(facts, f, indent=2)

print(f"{len(facts)} facts collected")

✅ Module 11 Checkpoint

You just performed the complete professional project setup — venv, packages, Git, API integration, persistence, retries. This ritual is the same at every company and every hackathon.

Final module: Capstone — prove the whole course with one build of your own.