Python Zone | Everything for the Python & Django developer

Esther Derby 04/20/13
3650 views
0 replies

How Much Self-management Is Right for a Team?

There are lots of teams in small companies and start-ups who are self-managing and self-directing. They manage themselves, they set product direction, and set company priorities. When I visit big, established companies, there’s almost always an assumption that teams need close supervision.

Arthur Charpentier04/19/13
1314 views
0 replies

Data News: Reinhart-Rogoff, Rule by Algorithm, and More

Lots of data news lately: Arthur Charpentier's roundup covers Reinhart-Rogoff, Kaggle, what algorithms tell us about the language of news, and much more.

Eric Gregory04/19/13
4374 views
0 replies

Links You Don't Want To Miss (Apr. 19)

Today: Mozilla's pluggable collaboration tool, CISPA, homemade drones, a radical new CSS best practice, and Code Monkey Saves World.

Steven Lott04/19/13
2646 views
0 replies

Legacy Code Preservation: What's the Story?

Back in the 70's, we had to tailor this cache to optimize performance on a computer that---by modern standards---was very small and slow. In the course of the conversion, I was assigned a script ("JCL" is what they called a shell script on Z/OS) that ran two programs and some utility sort steps...

John Cook04/19/13
2214 views
0 replies

Moments of Mixtures in Python

I needed to compute the higher moments of a mixture distribution for a project I’m working on. I’m writing up the code here in case anyone else finds this useful. (And in case I’ll find it useful in the future.)

Mike Driscoll04/18/13
3471 views
0 replies

Python Gets Funded by DARPA for Big Data Project: Blaze

I first heard about Blaze from NumPy’s original developer’s blog back in December 2012. Recently InformationWeek announced that DARPA was funding the project to the tune of $3 million dollars.

Mitch Pronschinske04/17/13
2108 views
0 replies

Links You Don't Want To Miss (4/17)

Computer dinosaurs still walk the earth. This story, plus a cool Mac Terminal easter egg, a prominent game written in QBASIC, and a Python heart monitor that only needs a webcam.

Eric Gregory04/17/13
6223 views
0 replies

Dev of the Week: A. Jesse Jiryu Davis

This week we're talking to A. Jesse Jiryu Davis, a developer at 10gen specializing in MongoDB, Python, Tornado, and Javascript.

Allen Coin04/17/13
3432 views
0 replies

Links You Don't Want to Miss: Apr. 17

Today: Everyone should learn to program, but not everyone should be a programmer; Is Stack Exchange hurting programming?; GitHub's new logo, and a "programming in a nutshell" comic.

Isaac Taylor04/17/13
4710 views
3 replies

Coding for the Changes You'll Have to Make Next Month

Anytime you find yourself looking at a class's implementation to figure out how to use the class, you're not programming to the interface, you're programming through the interface to the implementation. If you're programming through the interface, encapsulation is broken, and once encapsulation starts to break down, abstraction won't be too far behind.

Mike Driscoll04/17/13
930 views
0 replies

The Python Brochure Project

If you’ve been struggling to get Python adopted at your place of work, this brochure might help as it showcases how Python is used in business in various fields from industry and science to education and government.

René Pickhardt04/16/13
1294 views
0 replies

Teaching Web Science (Web Architecture and Web Ethics)

Overall we can say that the concept of the course worked really well. Especially putting such a high focus on the Web Architecture and actually letting students implement protocols helped to gain a deeper understanding.

Nick Johnson04/16/13
14772 views
0 replies

Algorithm of the Week: Fountain Codes (from "Damn Cool Algorithms")

Today's subject is Fountain Codes, otherwise known as "rateless codes". A fountain code is a way to take some data - a file, for example - and transform it into an effectively unlimited number of encoded chunks, such that you can reassemble the original file given any subset of those chunks...

John Sonmez04/16/13
4643 views
7 replies

So You Think You Can Polymorph?

In the true spirit of this blog I am going to take the complex idea of polymorphism and make it as simple as possible. Now you may already think you understand polymorphism—and perhaps you do—but I’ve found that most software developers don’t actually understand exactly what polymorphism is.

Lorna Mitchell04/16/13
1295 views
0 replies

Pretty-Printing JSON with Python's JSON Tool

Today's quick tip is something that was widely retweeted after my "Debugging HTTP" talk at the ever-fabulous WhiskyWeb conference last weekend. When working with JSON on the commandline, here's a quick tip for showing the JSON in a nicer format: