My fifth-grade teacher required us to write in a journal during class. She would often supply a topic that we would write about. My entries in the fall of 1978 indicated a bit of an obsession:

• If I had three wishes: Wish number 1: The Millennium Falcon
• Happiest moment: Seeing …

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A quick reference for time...

Get the current time in UTC

from datetime import datetime, UTC

datetime.now(UTC)

datetime.datetime(2025, 1, 28, 23, 4, 45, 419714, tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc)

You might think you should use datetime.utcnow() but:

Deprecated since version 3.12: Use datetime.now() with …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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Image credit: Stable Diffusion

These are some things that I find difficult about SQL.

Leaky abstraction

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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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