Technology – Page 3 – Chad Dotson

Virtualenvwrapper / Updating Tools

By chad August 15, 2015Programming Live Blog, TipsNo Comments

If you are using virtualenvwrapper with the default version of python on your system (OSX in particular) and I recommend updating pip and setuptools as part of your postmkvirtualenv hook. Just add the following line to YOURVIRTUALENVDIRECTORY/postmkvirtualenv. pip install -U pip setuptools

Don't use parse_requirements in your code

By chad August 15, 2015Programming, Programming Live BlogNo Comments

I just ran into trouble while building a setuptools package. Specifically, I was using pip.req.parse_requirements to process package dependencies from a requirements.txt file and noticed that upgrading pip would break my code. Upon further investigation, I found out that they(authors of pip) do not guarantee the api of their internal…

Thoughts on MVP

By chad July 30, 2015Programming, Software Engineering, TechnologyNo Comments

We all know that getting to a minimum viable product (MVP) is a race. It is a race against competition, market need, industry direction, etc, etc etc. I came to a realization recently that reaching MVP can also be a race against yourself and how long your technological choices hold…

The Python "in" Operator – Theoretical vs Actual Time Complexity

By chad July 20, 2015Doing Things Better, Programming, Software Engineering, TipsNo Comments

Background Sometimes we may generate or retrieve a list, set or even dict when creating collection of things that we will be testing against. Theoretically a set, frozenset or dictionary should be the fastest (and equivalent) forms of storage for this operation. However, what I've found is that on some…

Python Logger

By chad June 29, 2015Doing Things Better, Programming, Software Engineering, Technology, TipsNo Comments

The Scenario This scenario illustrates two possible mistakes people make when using the python logging module. Analyze the following code and look for issues. try: ... except SomeException as e: logger.error("Some meaningful error message. message={0}".format(e.message)) So what is wrong with that? First and foremost, the code fails to use the…

PyCharm and Version Control

By chad June 6, 2015Doing Things Better, Programming, Software Engineering, TipsNo Comments

So, you want to add your PyCharm project files to a VCS but you constantly deal with problems because each of your team members have different names/locations for their project interpreter. There is a rather simple solution to this problem. Basically, at the project level, PyCharm only cares about the…

DLSR Lightning Trigger 4

By chad May 19, 2015Hobbies, Photography, Programming, TechnologyNo Comments

Success again! This time the lightning trigger managed to capture a good bolt (though not as photogenic as I would have liked). I ran into trouble again with my camera exiting the "Quick-response remote" release mode. This caused me to miss more than a few events, but I did find…

Not Invented Here, Not Written By Me, and Reinventing The Wheel

By chad May 17, 2015Doing Things Better, Key Concepts, Programming, Software EngineeringNo Comments

Not invented here and not written by me are both driving factors in reinventing the wheel when developing software. We limit ourselves if we do not build upon the achievements of others. - Chad Dotson Not Invented Here I'm sure everyone has encountered developers that would prefer to implement everything…

C-Style Unions And Python

By chad May 8, 2015ProgrammingNo Comments

So, you're creating a C Union (used to create a variant type) and writing it to a file, socket, etc and want to read that in Python. There are two ways to deal with this. Assume the following union definition in C typedef union { int i; unsigned int u;…

DSLR Lightning Trigger 3

By chad April 26, 2015Arduino, Hobbies, Photography, Programming, Software Engineering1 Comment

Finally Some Lightning ... IT WORKS! Tonight, I was finally able to deploy the prototype of my lightning trigger. The storm wasn't particularly photogenic, but it at least helped prove the concept. Lightning was slim and no bolts were in the best area for my camera, but the camera did…