November appearance: KubeCon in Austin!

I'll be at KubeCon / CloudNativeCon in Austin next week (December 4-8).  Feel free to say "hi"!

website without pain

Want to put a webapp on your code, but don't care about HTML-CSS-JS? Anvil looks really amazing. You can build a "hello world" form with user registration and two linked Postgres data tables in 6 minutes!! Anvil hello world demo

For my recent wedding I worked building my own site for a while, then built a much better version using Google Forms in 20 minutes, ftw.

Appearances in October

Hi all! I love helping people.  For this month I'll be at these locations:

- 10/18: Mentorship Night with Girl Develop It LA!

This event helps intro developers gain confidence and industry knowledge, so they can make awesome stuff and/or get jobs.  I've had great fun volunteering for Girl Develop It the last two years, and am curious about extending my time to the Learn Teach Code group.

- 10/24: October meetup at Coding Dojo in Burbank

I've been attending to and speaking at the Socal Python group for years. As of this year I'm also coordinating. The people are so friendly and open! It's fun just to hang out with such easy and mellow people month after month, even when discussing esoteric technical topics.

This month one talk is on Bokeh, a cool Python visualization framework. This is great for the Data Science people, as Python is the dominant platform, so a graphical package is very helpful.  And, one of my projects Shotglass is using Bokeh in a modest way, to visually understand large collections of source code.

I hope to see you there, at Burbank and Culver City!

NPM package tip

FYI the only way to install and save Node/Javascript libraries is like this:

npm install mongoose@"~4.0.8" --save

This installs anything 4.0.x — major and minor are respected.  The option “@4.0.8” would be only 4.0.8, which is fine, but probably too picky.  The default “^4.0" is terrible and will install anything with major version 4. Don’t ever do this.  It’s also the default. Programmer emptor.

For Python, I generally do "pip install package" to install the latest version of a module, then "pip freeze mypackage >> requirements.txt" to capture the exact version number.

TIP: draw plots directly in terminal! (with iTerm2)

Example: your data is already in CSV format in "z.plt", this one-line command will render a plot and show it in the terminal:

gnuplot -e 'set terminal png ; set output "plot.png"; plot "z.plt" using 0:7 with lines' && imgcat plot.png

This is great for testing web site performance. The previous one line ran Apache Bench to beat the crap out of my local server, and write the output into a Gnuplot-compatible CSV file:

ab -n10000 -c100 -g z.plt http://192.168.64.3:30260/

slides: Design Patterns in Python

(this page is http://bit.ly/jta-patterns)

Slides in Google Docs, or just buy the book: "Design Patterns Explained Simply", via Sourcemaking. The have a lot of material online so check it out!

show all project code (a find-git-xargs example)

The following command finds all your project's Javascript files that aren't installed via NPM. It then does a "git blame" so you can see who wrote which bits of code, and how old the code is.

find . -path ./node_modules -prune -o -name '*.js' | xargs -n1 git blame --date=short --

If you're using OSX, install the GNU versions of the Unix tools

gfind . -path ./node_modules -prune -o -name '*.js' | gxargs -n1 git blame --date=short --

Those who don't understand Unix will be doomed to reimplement it. Poorly. :)