After the first week I spent at Hacker School, I worried that I wasn't spending enough time on improving my programming skills. So I started using Project Hamster to track chunks of time that I …

I've been writing and maintaining unit tests for my project. But only on Thursday did a colleague's presentation remind me that I could run a code coverage tool to check which code paths my tests …

I was playing with stdin/argv because Leonard suggested I improve Missing from Wikipedia to make it more Unixy and interoperable with other scripts and systems present and future. Right now it demands that you tell …

On Friday, while trying to work with standard input (stdin) and command-line arguments (argv), I accidentally wrote an almost-quine (a program that produces its own source code as output). I've removed a few debugging print …

"Missing from Wikipedia" (code) makes me happy. I presented about it yesterday at Hacker School, asked a fellow HSer to discuss his critique of my code, and - live! on stage! - merged his pull …

This week I wrote a tool I currently call "missing from Wikipedia" although the name may change. You feed it a list of people's names and the language Wikipedia you want to check, and it …

Dumping into a post some things I've learned recently, trying to disregard the potential "you didn't know that already?!?!" surprise, feigned or genuine, that people might impose on me.* How did I never use top …

It's autumn. I spent a bunch of September in San Francisco, trying to tie up loose ends at work so I could go on my sabbatical with a free heart. My notebook says things like: …

I recently came across Lauren Bacon's "The Accidental Boss: Making Peace with Power" again, and it reminded me: We don't talk enough about power. We don't talk enough about how hard it is to transition …

It's easier to read and contribute to code when it's stylistically consistent. This is a reason why we have PEP 8, the style guide for Python code. It says things like: Avoid extraneous whitespace in …