Blog
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Announcing: A free Webinar, and two online courses (functional Python and OO Python)
It’s time again for me to offer a free Webinar, as well as two online courses: I’m repeating my hour-long free Webinar about functional programming in Python on Wednesday, October 22nd. When I offered it last month, more than 200 people got tickets, and 70 participated. I had a blast, and nearly 2,000 people have viewed…
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Thinking with “map”
In the free Webinar I gave yesterday about functional programming, I mentioned that “map,” or its equivalent (e.g., Python’s list comprehensions), is a powerful tool that I use nearly every day. Once you get into the functional mode of thinking, you’re constantly finding ways to turn one collection into another collection. It’s a mindset that…
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The relative speeds of str.format and %
My most recent blog post talked about the use of str.format instead of the % operator for interpolating values into strings. Some people who read the post wondered about their relative speeds. I should first note that my first response to this is: I don’t really care that much. I’m not saying that speed isn’t…
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Teaching an old dog new tricks — or, how I learned to love Python’s str.format, and gave up on %
I have been programming in Python for many years. One of the things that I wondered, soon after starting to work in Python, was how you can get Perl-style variable interpolation. After all, Perl (like the Unix shell) supports two types of quotes — single quotes (in which everything is taken literally) and double quotes…
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Three Pythonic products: A (free) Webinar, a course, and an ebook
I love developing software. I also love helping people to learn how to develop better. That’s why I have been teaching programming classes for more than a decade, and why I write about programming. There is so much to learn; it’s a rare day on which I don’t learn something new, and it’s a rare…
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The easiest way to return to the last Git branch
I don’t know about you, but it’s common for me to switch between branches in Git. After all, that’s one of the main advantages of using Git — the incredible ease with which you can create and merge branches. Just a few minutes ago, I was in the “adwords” branch of an application I’m working…
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Remember: Don’t mix = and NULL
I was recently performing an analysis on the database for my dissertation software, and wanted to look at one particular set of rows. The table I was looking at is called Nodes, and because each node (represented by a row in the table) can optionally belong to a group, the group_id column allows for NULL…
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Book Review: The Undercover Economist Strikes Back
In order to get an undergraduate degree from MIT, at least when I was there, you needed to take a certain number of humanities and social-science courses. This was to stop you from coming out a complete one-dimensional student; the idea was that rounding out your education with knowledge from other fields was good for…