Okay, so I was messing around with this idea of creating a “fight club” membership system, you know, just for fun. Not a real fight club, of course. More like, a digital one, a secret group thingy.
Getting Started
First, I doodled some ideas on a napkin. Yeah, a real napkin. I wanted something simple. Just a way to add members, check if someone’s in the club, and maybe remove them if they break the rules (first rule of fight club, right?).
The Basic Setup
I fired up my trusty text editor. Decided to use Python because, well, it’s easy and I like it. No fancy databases or anything, just a simple list to store the member names.
I whipped up a few functions:
add_member(name): This one just slaps a new name onto the list.is_member(name): This checks if a name is already in the list.remove_member(name): You guessed it, this kicks someone out of the club.
Adding Some Spice
Just storing names was kinda boring, so I threw in a little “initiation” process. When you add a member, they get a randomly generated “code name.” It’s just a silly string of letters and numbers, but it felt more, you know, clandestine.
Every time I added a member it assigns a unique random string, that made me think of an alias, or handle.
Testing it Out
I ran the code and started adding some fake members. “Tyler Durden,” “Marla Singer,” you get the idea. I tested the is_member() function, and it worked like a charm. I even removed “Bob” (poor Bob), and he was gone. Mission accomplished.
The Final Product (Sort Of)
It’s nothing fancy, just a few lines of Python. But it does the job. It’s a fun little project, and it reminded me how much I enjoy just coding something up from scratch. It’s more like a proof of concept, really. I kept it super barebones, as simple as it could get.
Realizations
In the process I tested the code, it had some bugs but I fixed them.
It’s interesting how such a simple task can involve so many small decisions.
It’s not perfect, and it’s certainly not going to be used for any actual secret societies. But it was a fun way to spend an afternoon. Don’t use this system to manage any super-secret information. It’s all in plain text, and it will be visible to anyone with access.
