Author: John

i am a god

PyCon, day 2


Another great day of talks. How to Write Reusable Code. Best advice of the day, "Functions should return a result or have a side-effect, but not both." I never heard it suggested before, or thought of it myself. A great guideline for increasing code's maintainability and testability! Update: TIL this is called Command-query separation. Ansible … Continue reading PyCon, day 2 →

PyCon, day 1


Oh brother, did I drink from the firehose today! Lots of learning, even in "novice" sessions! How to be more Effective with Functions. Do you know the if iter(x) is iter(x) trick? What can Programmers learn from Pilots? Much, as it turns out. Beyond PEP 8 — Best Practices for beautiful intelligent code. How to … Continue reading PyCon, day 1 →

PyCon tutorials, day 2


This morning was Ansible 101. Great tutorial. This did what good tutorials should do: Efficiently explain the semantic terrain and explain the most important parts. This afternoon was an introduction to Elasticsearch. Solinea uses it, and like so technologies, I've jumped into it when duty called, but never took the time (slash had the opportunity...) … Continue reading PyCon tutorials, day 2 →

PyCon tutorials, day 1


This morning was Intro to Docker. I've wanted to try Docker, but didn't have the latitude and bandwidth for that at my previous employer, and wasn't sufficiently compelled to spend my personal time on it. This tutorial took us from ground zero up through coordinating and publishing multiple containers with docker-compose and docker-machine. This was a great tutorial, and I … Continue reading PyCon tutorials, day 1 →

The final tally on our Dish cord-cutting


A few changes since my last post on this topic... With the antenna in the equipment closet, we received 35 channels. After hiding channels we have no interest in (a children's cartoon channel, Home Shopping Network, etc.), we were down to 19 channels. I wanted to see if we could increase that without resorting to … Continue reading The final tally on our Dish cord-cutting →

Canceling Dish is a PITA


An update on our plans to cut the Satellite TV cord: I contacted Dish to cancel their service. Their web site doesn't have a link for doing this, so I e-mailed them. They replied, asking me to speak with a customer service rep to, "finalize the cancellation request." This was a little bothersome. I called and … Continue reading Canceling Dish is a PITA →

Review of Dell U2715H 27″ LCD monitor


As part of setting up a home office for my work for Solinea, I needed a large display. My go-to display has been Apple's Thunderbolt Display. It's got Thunderbolt integration, (somewhat dated) Apple design esthetics, and the right pixel count. But other aspects of this three and one-half year old display aren't so good. It's … Continue reading Review of Dell U2715H 27″ LCD monitor →