Ha, I've been working on this thing too, though I suspect for different use cases. I don't know if you were using this as a general example of how you managed to solve a problem...but this really isn't a "web programming" problem, in that it's a program that has many uses outside of a web server. In fact, it should be a standalone script that has no awareness of the web (unless it's doing something with a lot of moving parts, like recording results and doing machine learning).
In any case, the problem with people trying to learn web programming is that it encompasses many things...I'd argue that web programming doesn't really require learning HTML beyond the basic idea of HTML (and CSS)...and yet many beginner programmers spend a month or so thinking that programming consists of memorizing tags and CSS rules (nevermind cross-browser considerations)...which must be frustrating as hell.