The Python Experience

Dawn of the Era of Robots

What's the greatest gift I could give my daughter? Probably everything I know and can do, but only when and how she wants without forming a dependency. Similar challenge as humanity will face in not becoming too robot-dependent as really good ones finally come online.

Are you vendor-dependent, or dependent on a snapshot in time? If you only have a hammer and everything looking like a nail. Contrary-wise, if your toolbox is over-stuffed and disorganized, the equally debilitating problem of paralysis kicks in, and you're no better off than just having a hammer. And if your hammer is Excel macros, it'll have the added trait of just not working all the time. If you think there must be a better way, I'm here to tell you there is.

Warning: terrible audio. The Amiga computer. Active Server Pages on Windows. I won't get fooled again. All this state of the market and state of hardware and user interface bullshit that ties a beautiful act of creative expression to a certain narrow window of time when that particular proprietary software and unique hardware is in common production and daily use. But things change. Yet I hunger for a certain stability. How can I not go obsolete again? What was good and what was bad about previous dead-end technologies I have adopted? Did I mention I also owned a Coleco Adam?The solution? Controversial, but one possible valid for so many reasons, is Linix, Python, vim and git. Be fairly powerful and fairly timeless. You shall not be supremely powerful, for that would cramp your simple pragmatic API's style. But neither is it so limited that you couldn't try to tackle almost every problem you encounter this way first; before switching off to JavaScript or whatever else is for some more valid reason a better way to tackle a particular problem. I propose a Swiss Army knife of tech; and SEO in general.

My notion of a no framework framework is working out great. It's liberating thinking of the .py or .ipynb files as the config file of a framework situation—freeing you from the compulsion of immediately writing functions and classes, starting down the slipper slope of writing just such a new framework. Most frameworks make heave use of "config files" written in the host language that must go through a secondary interpreter written in that language in order to carry out instructions per the framework's conventions. But you have to limit yourself to only the subset of that host language's capabilities to only what that framework allows and supports. With the noframework approach, you can be as expressive as you like, getting down to the business of generating the effects you like.

I am finally working on my no-framework framework. Or maybe that is, I should say, I am not working on it. For it shall by my book; my codifying of a way of thinking, for which I am hereby a proponent: think of Linux, Python, vim and as that framework, for reasons I will spend the rest of this book enumerating. Such a mentality and approach will serve you well for the rest of your life—right up to and maybe through the robot revolution and emergence of super-intelligences. I propose killing like 5 birds with one stone, pardon the metaphor, by mastering this very short stack.

Python As a Framework (No more CRUD)

Tardigrade Circus Reboot

I'm kinda sorta writing a book here. I'm on Jury Duty today, and except for the possibility if actually being selected, it's an introvert's dream to be able to read a book or think and write while I wait. Nice. I should give some thought to how I write the book as I go.

Everything old is new again. It's time to re-learn SEO, and I think I'll do it from scratch with a brand-new site. I give a bit of history about how the Web become so popular so quickly, with the advent of the Mosaic browser, precursor to Netscape and Firefox, and Linux, Apache, MySQL and PERL (later PHP). Then I talk about how those slightly less intrepid Webmasters (like myself) tended to gravitate towards Microsoft IIS and SQL Server, simply due to availability and support at the office from the IT-style techs. In those days, you could do stuff like parse your weblogs rather easily, because there was less web traffic and the tools that made things easy didn't cut you off from your weblogs—before the incredible popularity of "tracking gifs" like Google Analytics that reduced the desire to parse weblogs. Today for this new endeavor, I think I'll use more of a "from-scratch" approach like the old days, just leveraging enough tools (like CMS systems) to alleviate the tedious and most difficult parts.

SEO Reboot & Python

Taking Inventory

Is Python Pandas More Fundamental Than SQL?

I get asked sometimes when advocating Jupyter Notebook at the office, whether it is a text editor or an IDE. Jupyter Notebook is more of a learning and experimentation environment. Some people call these things language shells or REPL's (read eval print loops), and they live somewhere off to the side of text editors like Atom, vim and Sublime. They're very friendly to the newcomer without all the overhead and complication of a full-fledged IDE like Visual Studio or Xcode. Also can't leave out the fact as part of the Anaconda install, there's hundreds of the most popular Python packages like Pandas immediately at your disposal without further installs.

Electron and TypeScript for Local Apps

Be Instantly Powerful On Any Platform Via Terminals

There's really 2 fundamental ways of organizing information: sequentially or hierarchically. With the power of today's tech, there's really no reason why you have to completely commit to one or the other. The trick is for your data-capture, revision and publishing systems to all help you with intelligent time-stamps and revision-control, so chronological sequential order (often, reverse-chronological like blogs) is always very easy to produce. Hierarchical organization is tantamount to "editing"—a process which I personally don't think there's enough time for in life (on my personal content after the work-day is over), yet that sort of organization is precisely what makes the worth-it content accessible and usable and valuable to an audience. Thus, I'm going to start to try to open a dialogue with my hardcore audience out there, and those few with enough patience to listen to this sort of stuff, whether there's interest in supporting me to get my act together and turn this into some sort of book, online lessons or such. It'd be about technology and equipping our children going into the future (in general) and about the use of Python in my day-to-day tasks, both professionally and personally (in particular).

SEO increasingly means Python

It takes a lifetime to master a tech, and there's nothing worse than choosing the wrong one. SQL is not that wrong, but it is riddled with nonsense and infinitely varied vender specific implementation details and runtime environment challenges. You can always go around them to a degree with SQLite, but even easier is to just use Pandas in Python. This podcast delves into the issues off lower-performance but more broadly applicable techniques versus higher-performance proprietary vendor implementations that are less broadly (and freely) applicable.

As a Weekend Dad, I realized thanks to a surprise visitor that one of the best and most important gifts I could give my child was a a nice hot home-cooked meal—even on weekends with Dad. And so in taking it up primarily for my daughter, I'm discovering the joys of cooking and benefits of a healthy, delicious and well balanced home cooked meal for myself too. Pic unrelated, hahaha!