One Big Fluke

This fall I gave talks at PyBeach and PyBay after presenting at PyCon US earlier this year.

This week I gave a keynote presentation at the first official PyCon Netherlands in Utrecht.

I started a new YouTube channel called Worst Practices in Software Development.

I recently received this question and thought it might be useful to publish my reply: "I'm a CS student...

I once asked Guido van Rossum (the creator of Python, and my former teammate working on Google App Engine) what he thought of functional programming languages.

This question has been answered many times before, but it bears repeating: Why do people like using dynamic languages?

(Via Vint Cerf) 1st programmer: Back in my day we didn't have fancy high-level languages, we had to use assembly. 2nd programmer: Pssh — assembly?

Yesterday's harvest

This week I announced that Effective Python: Second Edition is now available for preorder.

After many years of using only frequentist methods for survey statistics, I've also been spending a lot of time lately learning about and applying Bayesian methods (specifically for A/B testing).

The most valuable skill you can have as a junior developer is the ability to worry.

A dataset I've been playing around with recently is the list of names from the US Social Security Administration, which goes from the year 1880 through 2016.

Another big backlog of links from the past few months.

Quick refresher: I'm a life-long Mac user, but I was disappointed by Apple's latest MacBook Pro release.

Here's a big backlog of links I've enjoyed recently.

A realization I had this week: Software that costs money often has terrible UX, despite the developers having the revenue and resources to improve it.

The JavaScript language continues to get bigger and more complex.

Quite a backlog of good links this time!

My work is centered around building software.

I'm disappointed with the new MacBook Pros and I wrote my thoughts about them here.

The new MacBook Pros were released.

Despite the reviews, Lo and Behold by Werner Herzog was bad: clueless questions, no narrative.

I received a nice email last week from a professor at a major university, who asked: I'm wondering if you can share with me some advice on how to train inexperienced graduate students to be productive in writing quality code in a short period of time.

Zero-cost futures in Rust: Standardizing how futures / deferreds work in a language is a good idea.