Raspberry Pi Pico Apology Button
When playing Call of Duty, I like "hardcore" mode, where a bullet or two is enough to send someone off to respawn land rather than having to empty half a clip. That mode also allows for friendly fire, which is a challenge. I appreciate that the game starts reflecting damage …
Thoughts on A Philosophy of Software Design
John Ousterhout's A Philosophy of Software Design sometimes aligned with and other times challenged my opinions about building software. The overall theme could be summarized with a Ray Ozzie quote: "Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces …
The Happy Coder
Image credit: Stable Diffusion
I encountered the following quote by Clive Thompson a while back:
When you meet a coder, you're meeting someone whose core daily experience is of unending failure and grinding frustration.
I chuckled and thought, Oh, man, sometimes that is spot on.... I've found myself pondering the …
What's hard about SQL
Image credit: Stable Diffusion
These are some things that I find difficult about SQL.
SQL is the poster-child for leaky abstractions.
The SQL language is meant to abstract away the procedural steps that are needed to query a database, instead allowing you to define merely what you want …
Review of "Python Testing with pytest, Second Edition"
Even though I've been using pytest for years, being a testing enthusiast, I thought I'd read Brian Okken's book to see what I might be able to learn from it. I was pleased to discover not only several tidbits of the workings of pytest I hadn't known about, but also …
Review of "Waxing On: The Karate Kid and Me"
Hollywood memoirs aren't things I normally read. I like movies, but usually I prefer the characters to the actors, so I'm fine being ignorant. Waxing On: The Karate Kid and Me by Ralph Macchio ended up in my hands after helping a neighbor with a computer problem. The problem was …
Experimenting with Stable Diffusion on my own machine
AI generated artwork has been in the news a lot lately, from the person who won an art contest with a computer-generated image, to Microsoft recently announcing that they'd include AI image generation in their Bing search engine. I've fiddled a little with online services for AI image generation, but …
PyCon US 2022
I wrapped up my participation in this year's PyCon last night. Being in Salt Lake City was great, since that's just a half-hour drive from my house, but it also means that I don't have the "completely focused on this" experience that traveling to a conference gives you. For example …
Architecture Patterns with Python Review
Architecture Patterns with Python by Harry Percival and Bob Gregory
I learned about this book by watching Harry Percival's 2020 PyCon talk Stop Using Mocks (for a while). In the past, I was pretty enthusiastic about mocks, especially in Python because they, along with patching, let me test just about …
UI Horror: Login... Again
I use Office 365 with the web version of Outlook at work. At some point, I'll notice that the browser tab has changed appearance, and click on it to find that I've been logged out. No worries, there's a prompt right there for my password to renew my session. Soon …