Orbifolds and Other Games

The Python Toolbox

Thu 01 February 2018 by Moshe Zadka

I have written before about Python tooling. However, as all software, things have changed -- and I wanted to write a new post, with my current understanding of best practices.

Testing

As of now, pytest has achieved official victory. Unless there are overwhelming reasons to use something else, strongly consider using …

Jupyter is a tool that came out of the data science community. In science, being able to replicate experiments is of the utmost importance -- so a tool where you can "show your work" is helpful. However, being able to show your work -- have colleagues validate what you have done, repeat …

Write Python like an expert

Sun 17 December 2017 by Moshe Zadka

Ten tricks to level up your Python.

Trick 0 -- KISS

Experts know about the weird dark corners of Python -- but do not use them in production code. The first tip is remembering that while Python has some interesting corners, they are best avoided in production code.

Make your code as …

Interesting text encodings (and the people who love them)

Wed 13 December 2017 by Moshe Zadka

(Thanks to Tom Prince and Nelson Elhage for suggestions for improvement.)

Nowadays, almost all text will be encoded in UTF-8 -- for good reasons, it is a well thought out encoding. Some of it will be in Latin 1, AKA ISO-8859-1, which is popular in the western world. Less of it …

Exploration Driven Development

Sun 10 December 2017 by Moshe Zadka

"It's ok to mess up your own room."

Sometime there is a problem where the design is obvious -- at least to you. Maybe it's simple. Maybe you've solved one like that many times. In those cases, just go ahead -- use Test-Driven-Development, lint your code as you're writing, and push a …

Abstraction Cascade

Tue 14 November 2017 by Moshe Zadka

(This is an adaptation of part of the talk Kurt Rose and I gave at PyBay 2017)

An abstraction cascade is a common anti-pattern in legacy system. It is useful to understand how to recognize it, how it tends to come about, how to fix it -- and most importantly, what …

Gather

Mon 13 November 2017 by Moshe Zadka

Gather is a plugin framework -- and it now has its own blog.

Use it! If you like it, tell us about it, and if there is a problem, tell us about that.

Brute Forcing AES

Wed 27 September 2017 by Moshe Zadka

Thanks to Paul Kehrer for reviewing! Any mistakes or oversights that are left are my responsibility.

AES's maximum key size is 256 bits (there are also 128 and 192 bit versions available). Is that enough? Well, if there is a cryptographic flaw in AES (i.e., a way to recover …