I am the parent of two young kids. It is easy to sink into random stuff, and not follow up on goals. Strict time management and prioritization means I get to work on open source projects, write programming books and update my blog with a decent cadence. Since a lot …

A while ago, I decided I wanted to self-publish a book on improving your Python skills. It was supposed to be short, sweet, and fairly inexpensive.

The journey was a success, but had some interesting twists along the way.

From the beginning, I knew what technology I wanted to write …

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a shared state in possession of mutability, must be in want of a bug." -- with apologies to Jane Austen

As Ms. Austen, and Henrik Eichenhardt, taught us, shared mutable state is the root of all evil.

Yet, the official documentation of functools tells …

There is a lot of code that overloads the __call__ method. This is the method that "calling" an object activates: something(x, y, z) will call something.__call__(x, y, z) if something is a member of a Python-defined class.

At first, like every operator overload, this seems like a …

A couple of months ago, a successful attack against the Node ecosystem resulted in stealing an undisclosed amount of bitcoins from CoPay wallets.

The technical flow of the attack is well-summarized by the NPM blog post. Quick summary:

1. nodemon, a popular way to run Node applications, depends on event-stream.
2. The …

JSON is a useful format. It might not be ideal for hand-editing, but it does have the benefit that it can be hand-edited, and it is easy enough to manipulate programmatically.

For this reason, it is likely that at some point or another, checking in a JSON file into your …

If you want to speak to me, 1-on-1, about anything, I want to be able to help. I am a busy person. I have commitments. But I will make the time to talk to you.

(Thanks to Nelson Elhage and Saivickna Raveendran for their feedback on earlier drafts. All mistakes that remain are mine.)

When talking about garbage collection, the notion of "generational collection" comes up. The usual motivation given for generational garbage collection is that "most objects die young". Therefore, we put the objects …

As my friend Thursday said in her excellent talk (sadly, not up as of this time) naming things is important. Avoiding in-jokes is, in general, a good idea.

It is with mixed feelings, therefore, that my pun-loving heart reacted to Chris's disclosure that the most common suggestion was to call …

(Thanks to Brian for his feedback. All mistakes and omissions that remain are mine.)

Some commands have a --dry-run option, which simulates running the command but without taking effect. Sometimes the option exists for speed reasons: just pretending to do something is faster than doing it. However, more often this …