Author: John

i am a god

Hello customer, you’re a moron


I just upgraded a macOS application. I won't give the name. But here's a tasty snippet from their user manual. Somewhere there's a manager or maybe a technical writer who thought it was useful to tell the reader to review the Table of Contents, which includes page numbers.

PyCon 2017, day three


11:33: The jobs fair and poster boards were interesting. Nothing directly applicable to my current work, though. It's great to reconnect with friends at PyCon. This is a social event almost as much as it is a technical one. 08:50: In lightning talks ATM. The last day of the conference. I'm dragging my luggage around all … Continue reading PyCon 2017, day three →

PyCon 2017, day two


13:29: Most of the talks I'm going to today are about Python 3.6. (Performance, new features, new magic methods, etc.) Videos of the talks and tutorials are being uploaded to a YouTube channel. 08:39: Lightning talks.  Daniel and Karim did the 5K. I slept.

PyCon 2017, day one


17:33: I'm bushed. I planned on attending the lightning talks and then the conference dinner, but I feel my control rods auto-inserting and I know it's best to pace myself. Great talks on Python 3.6 performance and antiquated Python anti-patterns. A very good talk about conda. And a talk about pdb that started off at a beginner level … Continue reading PyCon 2017, day one →

PyCon tutorials, day two


19:10: We went to Nicholas. Decent place. Had a nice lamb kabob. 13:20: Parallel data analysis. Wow. An expansive survey of the SOTA in Python parallelizing technologies: Concurrent.futures, Spark, Dask, etc. This is what a good tutorial does — surveys a taxonomy and illuminates the tradeoffs and overlaps. It can beat reading N articles by Y authors who … Continue reading PyCon tutorials, day two →

PyCon tutorials, day one


17:00: This afternoon's tutorial was an introduction to statistical modeling. We started off badly when the instructor sent us the preparatory instructions about two hours before the start. It included downloading and installing Anaconda, which is a mother of a download and a mother of an install. The available time was actually less than two hours … Continue reading PyCon tutorials, day one →