Grok some code. Programming tutorials, long form articles, and opinion pieces about building things on the internet.
Code review has the proven benefit of reducing bugs, but there are so many more reasons to love code review. It is also a great way to improve code clarity, avoid the “hit by a bus” problem, learn new things, and solidify the team. Find bugs Catching bugs early is probably the most talked about benefit of code review. The sooner bugs are found, the easier, faster, and cheaper it is to fix them. So…
GrokCode has officially been a Jekyll site for a few months now. Why move from WordPress to a static Jekyll site hosted on GitHub Pages? Lots of reasons! The Good A Jekyll site offers a number of advantages versus a WordPress site. One of the biggest wins is being able to switch from a shared hosting environment running WordPress to a static site hosted by GitHub. Static sites are faster than…
Snakefood is a tool written by Martin Blais to create Python dependency graphs. Combined with GraphViz, snakefood can create beautiful visualizations of Python codebases. Here are graphs for some notable open source projects written in Python. Python Web Frameworks The different development philosophies of Bottle, Django, Flask, and Pyramid are apparent by looking at their snakefood graphs. Bottle…
Sometimes it is handy to allow users to change part of their profile without having to log in, as long as we can be reasonably sure of their identity. The most common use case is to unsubscribe from email newsletters, where it is annoying to have to login first. The workflow we want to handle looks like this: User clicks an unsubscribe link. We verify the security token on the unsubscribe link.…
If you write Python code, switching to IPython is the number one thing you can do to immediately improve your productivity. Bold words, I know. Let’s look at how IPython can make you a more productive programmer. If you are mostly a web developer or are new to Python, the IPython homepage does not make it obvious how awesome IPython is (even if you don’t do any scientific computing!). If you have…
Single command deploys are awesome. When setting up a testing or production server, I always setup a script to deploy in a single command because it makes life easier and encourages frequent deploys. There are many different ways of setting up one click deploys. This tutorial covers how to setup a git postcommit hook that deploys on git push prod , which is pretty simple to get started with, but…
This is a tutorial for setting up a Linux, Nginx, uWSGI, Python, Django server with a PostgreSQL database. This is the easy, straightforward approach to server setup and deployment. The intended audience is developers or teams who need to get an application or two running in production without too much hassle. If you need to oversee multiple servers or you are handling a large number of…
Dear Python, something has been bothering me for a while. Its just that, well, ummm…you’re kind of ugly. Look, you are beautiful inside: Python is a beautiful language and the Python community is open and welcoming. But Python resources are ugly enough to affect usability and adoption. This is damaging to the community. Documentation and tutorials are often difficult to navigate. Products built…
There is some famous research , by Saeed Dehnadi and Richard Bornat, about “programming sheep and non-programming goats.” The gist is that educators find that there are two populations of students, those who can program, and those who can’t. Each population has it’s own independent bell curve. This “double hump” persists despite variations in programming language, application type, IDE, and…
My intent is to give recommendations that will be of use to other programmers who are trying to quickly turn a side project into a professional product that they can sell. Assuming you already have a working side project or product (no small feat in itself, but not difficult for a coder to put together), the biggest missing piece is a website for getting that project into the hands of customers.…