First hands-on experience with Tkinter (Python's UI library)

Python has been a preferred language among some developers for some years now. Looking back at my first experience with Python in the year 2019, I never really built anything python that had a user interface till the ALX SE program gave me a portfolio project to work on.

I had no idea what to build and what technology to use. I was challenged to be creative, a state I had missed in my life for over 2 years since I hadn’t written code in that time span and I remembered a conversation I had a few weeks ago with my new boss. The conversation was about people buying fuel in quantity not amount. Then it struck me, ok just build a convertor application that will handle that process so that people can know the quantity of fuel they are to receive with the amount they are willing to spend.

Then I went to my whiteboard to start the development process. Asked some if and came up with a flowchart of this convertor.

So the logic of this convertor application is for the user to input an amount of money they prefer to know the quantity of fuel they are to receive. This first phase of the project supports a few currencies though the API supports all currencies, I will be updating the application on my Github for the fun of it. The amount the user inputs will be converted to USD by the API and then calculate the quantity of fuel using a fixed value(The idea is to use an API that will feed live fuel rates). In future updates, I will be adding geolocation APIs to give the user the calculation according to the user’s location.

This is the final outlook of the project and this UI will be updated too. Working on this project made realize how easy it is to work with Tkinter, python’s UI library and also helped me set on a path to restore my creative side. Initially I thought 2 years break from coding would be a hurdle to reorient myself in the space again but this project has taught me, “once a soldier, always a soldier”.

Feel free to tweak the source code on my Github. This project was built for fun though.