Our First Week of Festive Python Apps

We’re a week into the Anvil Advent Calendar – we’re building a festive Python web app, every day until Christmas!

What have we seen so far? Here are some highlights:

Compose your Christmas cards with AI

We took a titanic achievement of data science, the GPT-2 neural network, and used it to compose schmaltzy Christmas messages. It’s a heartwarming story, and you can follow along even if you have no data science experience at all:

Christmas Cards with a Neural Network

Advent Calendar Day 5: One of 2019's biggest pieces of AI news was GPT-2, a text-generating neural network from OpenAI. It was a massive scientific leap forwards, and yet remarkably easy to have fun with. Here's the app...

Manage your Party RSVPs

Christmas parties are easier when you know who’s going to show up. So collect their RSVPs by email:

Automate your Party invites and RSVPs!

Advent Calendar Day 7: It's definitely Christmas Party Season! Sending invites and managing rsvps can be a pain, so why not let Python do the work for you? We're going to have a few different screens depending on whether a party is being added, or someone is responding to an RSVP. So, let's have a blank Homepage...

Secret Santas with Python

An office Secret Santa is a great idea, but who wants to organise it? They’d spoil the secret! Do it with Python instead:

Choosing Secret Santas with Python

Advent Calendar, Day 3: Build a Python app to set up a Secret Santa gift exchange! You want to exchange Christmas presents at your office, sports club or D&D group, but you don't want to get presents for _everybody_. So you set up a Secret Santa -- everyone buys a present for someone else, and everyone gets a present. Who bought yours? It's a secret.

A Christmas Wish-List

Do people find it hard to buy you presents? Publish your wish-list with this app:

Share your Christmas Wishlist

If your friends and family haven't already bought you everything you've always wanted, they might need some digital assistance. Here's an app for all your yuletide purchasing needs!

Add to your Wishlist by Email

No need to open your browser. Just send your app an email:

Add to your wishlist by email

Advent Calendar Day 6: Remember our wishlist app? Today we're going to make it a little more convenient. We're going to make it possible to add to your wishlist by email. Of course, you can't 'log in' when you send an email. But there's a way to ensure the user is who they claim to be, and it's called DKIM...

Count down to Christmas

It’s the most important question of the year: how-many-days-until-christmas.com

How Many Days Until Christmas? (dot com)

Advent Calendar, Day 4: December has really started, and it's time to start counting down the days until Christmas. How better than to build a Python web app? The calculation itself is pretty simple, thanks to Python's "datetime" library. We can do it all in the browser...

Count down to Christmas: The API

Build a machine-readable festive countdown:

Christmas Countdown: The API

For those of you who prefer your Christmas cheer in JSON format, we've re-rendered the Christmas countdown for your viewing pleasure. Say hello to the Days to Christmas API: https://christmas-days.anvil.app/_/api/get_days

There’s more! See the whole Advent Calendar:


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Get tomorrow's app in your inbox

Don't miss a day! We'll mail you a new web app every morning until Christmas Day: