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… Continue reading In person
Category: python
Creating a desktop application using Python (part 2)
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… Continue reading Creating a desktop application using Python (part 2)
Backing away from GCP
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… Continue reading Backing away from GCP
Async
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… Continue reading Async
Sentiment analysis
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… Continue reading Sentiment analysis
Why Python is a good choice for academics
I’ve been thinking about the role of Python in higher education. There’s a lot going on in that space, and the TL;DR version of this post is that I think Python is a good language choice for academics. If you’d like to hear my reasons, I have three: Python has a wide range of possible… Continue reading Why Python is a good choice for academics
Highlighting new books for faculty
This post is co-written with Julia Furay. Thanks to the dedicated work of our acquisitions librarian, Prof. Julia Furay, the Kingsborough library buys a lot of interesting books throughout the academic year. Typically, these are displayed on the New Books shelf for about a week before they find their permanent homes upstairs in the library… Continue reading Highlighting new books for faculty
A reason to like broken Python
Python developers often want their code to be “Pythonic”, usually meaning that they want what they write to be particularly suited to the idiom of the language. To the beginner, this usually seems like an obviously good idea, but so vague as to be hard to put into practice. To be honest, I often opt… Continue reading A reason to like broken Python
Building usability testing tools
My colleague Carlos and I have been doing some usability testing recently, and have built some of our own tools to make it happen. We created a testing interface using JavaScript, which has largely been a success. Our interface gives students tasks to complete, and workspaces to complete them. Reassuringly, students participating in our study… Continue reading Building usability testing tools
Programming language matters
While it is probably true that you can learn to code in any programming language, lately I’ve felt that language choice is nonetheless important. The languages we learn affect the kind of work we end up doing a bit further down the road. I’ve recently begun to notice how leaning to code in Python has… Continue reading Programming language matters
