Prodigious PyTorch Processing with Python

Back in the day, when you wanted to get some data into Python, it was easy enough to load the whole .csv or .txt file into memory, do the kind of operations you needed, and be done with it. Then came generators and streaming formats for stuff that wouldn’t quite fit into RAM. Nowadays, even lazy iterators can fail you from time to time, especially when dealing with big data and resource constrained machines, like Google Colab.

Major League Hacking Mentorship

I am again excited to be participating in the MLH Fellowship, a 12-week program pairing promising young developers with mentors and experts working in the world of open-source software development. It is a fantastic program that has allowed me to work together with talented students all over the world.

This semester’s fellows are assisting with the development of howdoi, a simple tool for finding answers to common programming questions.

Howdoi Mentorship

Every now and again I miss the library. A hall of wisdom, quiet and serene, with stacks and stacks of worlds to explore. Nowadays, the internet has largely replaced the role of trawling through shelves of books and reams of microfilm.

Software development, once a bastion of deep thought and planning, has in the modern era been reduced to the tying together of disparate APIs and the inevitable Quest for the most pertinent StackOverflow page. Howdoi, a simple tool for finding answers to common programming questions, was largely a response to the seemingly never-ending shuffle between the code editor and the web browser. When spending time in the latter, there’s a pretty good chance you might find yourself distracted from the task at hand.

Automatic App Deployment with “git push”

When deploying pet projects on remote servers, I dislike the extra step of logging into the remote machine to execute a git pull (and perhaps a server reload) every time I push new code. Sure there’s Jenkins and all sorts of bazooka-like solutions, but this is a knife fight. Poking around an old PHP repo, I found a nifty line of code that will update your app via a URL endpoint.

Wrangling Toy Applications with Supervisor and Nginx

I am a toymaker. Some toys are simple, others complex, and some are just plain wacky. What unites these toys are that they are:

• Awesome
• Stand alone applications that don’t share a common codebase
• Written in a variety of languages

Showcasing, hosting, and monitoring applications can be difficult, especially if you want to have them all live under one domain or URL path (e.g. http://gleitzman.com/apps/appname). Whether you’re working in Python, Javascript, or Ruby you need a reverse-proxy that can receive requests and delegate to a specific application’s server. I’ve tried a number of techniques but ultimately landed with supervisor and nginx.

Howdoi – Instant Coding Answers via the Command Line

One of my favorite collaborations to come out of the illustrious Oxidized Bismuth Blogger (OxBiz) ideation list is howdoi, a tool for instant coding answers via the command line.

The idea is simple – ask a question and get an answer.

$ howdoi format date bash
> DATE=`date +%Y-%m-%d`

Howdoi solves life’s little coding mysteries like the always frustrating command line flags for tar (as illustrated by XKCD).

TardyParty: Automating Google Groups with Python and PHP

After months of excellent idea generation on Oxidized Bismuth Blogger (a mailing list for short-form musings and wacky business ideas) last week the OxBiz crew held its first meetup/hike in Redwood Regional Park. One idea that came out of the meetup was a weekly summary proclaiming who had submitted ideas that week and who had failed to post. This email would hopefully shame delinquent list members into posting more frequently.

Rumpelstiltskin, or, a Question of Frames

A name is an extremely powerful device. From the Grimm Brother’s Rumpelstiltskin to He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, literary texts are filled with examples of the power of names.

The same principles hold in the world of computer science. When programming, once you’ve determined the name of an object you wield tremendous power over it. However, names can often be a burden. I can’t fathom how many times I’ve used the following construct:

Nice to See You – Recognizing Faces using Face.com

Last month, and to a small amount of fanfare, Face.com released an API for performing facial recognition on an arbitrary set of images. Most exciting is its support for recognizing friends on Facebook and Twitter.

Kami has graciously written a Python library for Face.com and released it on github.

Here is some sample code for taking a photo on a Mac, recognizing the face, and then cross-referencing Facebook for the user’s info.