Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Hacker School Miscellanea
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2014 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
Found in an email I sent a few years ago: "I'm freaking 30 now, so I have decided to be Mature, stop feeling bad that I don't learn stuff well on my own, and take classes that play to my predilection towards collaborative structure." As it turns out, I think "don't learn stuff well on my own" was an oversimplification; approximately no one truly learns on their own, after all; I needed a more synchronous community rather than a purely asynchronous one.
Found in an old blog draft that I will never turn into a proper post:
virtualenvwrapper andworkon
pip freezeBeautiful Soup
context manager - "
with x as y" (especially for files)
Unicode stuff
modules that are often useful -requests, os, sys, time, datetime, codecs, unittest
list comprehensiondifferent remotes
git add -p
What it looks like to merge a pull requestWritten? Kitten!'s code uses localStorage
Laura Lindzey blogs about whether she'd do Hacker School again; her answer is that she would not, though she loved it, because "Programming is no longer the thing I struggle most with." I smiled at the very last item on her list of things she particularly wants to learn about right now, because I'm genuinely comfortable with my skills in that area and that's one reason I can take a break from it to be at Hacker School.
My batchmate Alyssa Carter has the best About page I have seen in eons.
I got stuck on the sixth of the Matasano crypto challenges last week. I'm going to take another look at it this week now that I've cried a bit, gotten a new perspective from Alex Clemmer, and spent the weekend in Rhode Island at a friend's wedding reception. Gosh those trees are pretty right now, perfectly autumnal. I'm also eyeing Natas which is more directly the type of serverside web security game that piques my interest. All this on top of the main thing I'm doing during Hacker School this go-round, webdev play.
