This past week, the CUNY Academic Commons — the home for this blog — was offline for a few days, as they were migrating to new hosting. Then, when it came back, you may have noticed that the theme for the blog was all wonky, and some of the functionality was not working. Anyhow, this… Continue reading Obligatory static site generator post
Category: python
Log
On Saturday, March 14th, 2020, the day after we were sent home on account of the plague’s arrival in New York, I started keeping a log of all of the work things that I did. With very few exceptions, I’ve kept logging every day since then. The log is now approaching 10,000 entries, so I… Continue reading Log
Transformative
Recently, I posted about my commitment to read one academic article per day. It’s now been just over a month that I’ve been doing this, and I have to say, it has been transformative. I feel a whole new level of engagement with my work and my discipline. This has also prompted me to read… Continue reading Transformative
On sometimes needing to explicitly copy Python dicts
I recently ran into a Python problem that stumped me for a bit. I was looping through a list of dicts and modifying the dicts slightly, then appending them to a new list. But it wasn’t behaving like I thought it would. Despite my loop being extremely simple and easy to step through mentally, my… Continue reading On sometimes needing to explicitly copy Python dicts
JavaScript for teaching and learning
It turns out that JavaScript has proven more useful for my job than Python. I certainly use it more. I assume this is an inevitable result of being a Web Librarian. JavaScript has seeped into my professional life. Part of me wishes this was different. If I were at a research institution, I might find… Continue reading JavaScript for teaching and learning
Replit
Since 2016, I’ve hosted many of my Python projects on PythonAnywhere. It has been a reliable and easy platform to use, but recently I’ve been worrying about its future. While I don’t have any particular insights into the health of the PythonAnywhere organization, the technology seems to have mostly stagnated. It makes me wonder how… Continue reading Replit
Return to python
After a lengthy absence, I am returning to Python. This is thanks to my new involvement with CUNY’s Alma Extensibility Task Force, which I mentioned in an earlier post. I am excited. My recent work in JavaScript has been fun and instructive, but I feel more of an affinity for the Python community, and I’m… Continue reading Return to python
Bilingual
I’m currently reading a book by Kyran Dale called Data Visualization with Python and JavaScript, and it’s super interesting. In my experience, it’s very unusual to find a fully bilingual programming book. This is a great example. Most technical books, for better or worse, focus exclusively on one programming language. I’m still in the early… Continue reading Bilingual
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one that was not machine learning
I started making a Mastodon bot over the weekend, although I’m not super excited about it. Mostly this is because, from a technical perspective, it’s not new ground for me. The bot is text-based, and uses Python and SpaCy to work with text drawn from the Wikipedia API. I’ve done this before, so I’m not… Continue reading Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one that was not machine learning
Time
Programming around dates, times, and timezones is painful. I’ve done this in Python and in JavaScript and it was miserable either way. It’s due to the complexities of time that we mostly ignore in our day to day lives. We are able to do this because we generally are not in multiple timezones at the… Continue reading Time
