Technical Enthusiasm Isn't All Bad
Image credit: Stable Diffusion
I've read some things recently about choosing the right tool for the job, from a technology and programming language perspective. Most recently it was a post by Jeremy Bowers.
In it, he pokes at Python's weaknesses, but he isn't really writing about Python (as he says …
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 …