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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
PyGotham is a fine conference, but it is online again this year, and I have frankly reached my limit on how many online events I can attend. At this point, my eyeballs rebel at the prospect of watching another Zoom presentation. So I am considering some other things. Like PyCon. PyCon 2023 in Salt Lake […]
Usually code works for a while, until it doesn’t. That happened to me this week with new-books-desktop, my desktop application for producing our monthly new books list. I had recently lost the virtualenv that was being used to build the executable to a replaced hard drive, and was hoping that it would be easy enough […]
I finally got a working prototype of my journal recommender project up and running; I just shared it with a few co-workers yesterday. However, it has been a bit of a journey to get here: I was only able to get the project finished by backing away from Google Cloud Platform. I won’t dwell on […]
I started working with Python around version 3.3, which predates the addition of asynchronous features into the language’s standard library. Asynchronous programming in Python has come a long way since then; it is now a well-established feature of the language. I first wrestled with async on an Amtrak train, on my way home from the […]
For almost five years now, our library has been archiving tweets about our college. I’ve posted about that here and here. Until recently, I didn’t really have an agenda for this data, other than preserving it. Last week that changed. At our college’s Data Faculty Interest Group, I mentioned the tweet archive as a potentially […]
