For a recent hackathon project, I wanted to setup a client/server configuration, all in Python, so that the server could run shell commands and stream the output back to the client. The client was a Raspberry Pi and the server was my laptop, which already had my real project setup.

My first thought was to do this over HTTP, with Requests for the client and Bottle for the server. I started writing some code, checked the Bottle docs for sending a streaming response, and was running with a few lines.

Sometime last year, I remember finding a code snippet to help switch between Python virtual environments, which I added to my .bashrc.

menuvirtualenv() {
    select env in `lsvirtualenv -b`; do
        if [ -n "$env" ]; then
            workon "$env"
        fi;
        break;
    done;
}
alias v.menu='menuvirtualenv'

12:54:26 pcoles@peters_air:~ > v.menu
1) category-cms
2) collect
3) mrcoles
4) readmd
#? 3
(mrcoles)12:54:33 pcoles@peters_air:~/projects/mrcoles >

This method for selecting an input stood out to me for being so simple: just a numbered list. Many command line applications make input too complex, making the user think about what they want to select, making them type it in again, while many don’t even support tab complete.

It has now been several weeks since my twenty-seventh birthday. A birthday is generally always a reason to celebrate, but this birthday, my startup was acquired by Yelp several days beforehand, which makes this birthday extra special!

Startups are hard work. Finding a market, building a product, growing that product, figuring out which corners to cut, or not cut; it’s all hard work, even though some may make it look easy. I was lucky to be one of the early engineers at SeatMe and am proud of the team and product we helped build, while learning some new things along the way. Yelp is a great company with a great culture and I’m looking forward now to continuing to grow the product.

This blog is now being built using Middleman, a well documented and quite flexible Ruby static site generator. I had a pretty good run with Blogofile, the previous engine used to build this blog: over three years. I’m well aware I spend too much time bike-shedding and re-tooling sometimes, but the Ruby community keeps pushing things forward and Middleman has some great features worth upgrading for.

The Great Solution

Middleman’s smart idea is to break everything about a website into a mix of files, folders, and data. Files can be any format and rendered using any of a dozen different formats, so if you want to use Markdown or any other format for writing blog articles, you can. But you can use do Coffeescript for JS files or Less/SASS for CSS files; they are all just files to be rendered.

Several months ago, I had the pleasure of completing a GoRuck Light event. It involved a seven-ish mile hike through the Presidio area of San Francisco, getting a little wet, and finding some new limits for what I know I can accomplish.

What is GoRuck?

For a little backstory, GoRuck is an American company founded by some ex-special forces folks (the Cadre) that makes pretty durable backpacks and has started doing a series of military style events that physically and mentally challenge you, while training you to work together with a random group of people.

There is definite value to moving where you work and frequently changing your perspective on your work, when you are looking for ideas. I have gotten some of my best ideas recently from conferences, traveling to PyCon in Santa Clara and this past weekend, Write the Docs in Portland.

The What

Write the Docs is a conference organized to talk about documentation, for those who document, organize, and share information. It originated as a crazy idea over beers, but the founders kept investigating and figured out how they could actually make a conference happen. I found out about it via Hacker News and decided to sign up as a cheap and fun trip to Portland.

This year was my second PyCon and I wanted to share some thoughts from the experience. Although it is quite a large event running well over a week, I attended for just a few days and took away a good amount of information. The two big themes I noticed, maybe just from the selection of talks I attended, were Python 3 and IPython.

Python 3

Python 3 was originally slated to have something around a five-year rollout, which would put us in 2013. Last year, I noticed a few talks for Python 3 and focus still on porting, but this year I felt Python 3 was being used as the default in most talks. Many (most?) major libraries and tools seem to have switched over to Python 3.3 and it seems like the community is moving on. Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s talk on Django and Python 3 was pretty straightforward and useful. With Django 1.5 now having Python 3 support, the work has moved to upgrading Django libraries. The vibe to me is that most people have accepted and started using it where possible.

Over the last year, I’ve made the effort to get most of my passwords into 1Password. It’s pretty nice to only have to remember one password, along with easily with increasing your overall online security. Whenever another bank or website gets their password list stolen, I’m not concerned because my password for that site was “0RLrA4GQeGlRZR” or some other gibberish that was unique to that specific site.

Anyways, I still use a bevy of command line tools that mostly keep their passwords in .cfg files or $ENV variables in my home directory. It’s frustrating to have plain text passwords lying around, even if they are just random tokens.

Over the last few years, I’ve integrated and used many different open source projects, looking at a wide range of code quality, documentation, and project organization. Code is just one part of a project, first impressions matter, and especially when deciding to add a dependency to your project, you want to judge a project on many different metrics.

READMEs are a big first impression. They can summarize your project, show quick getting started documentation, licensing information, and are a good metric about the overall state of your project. GitHub has pushed especially hard for developers to use READMEs, in trying to make open source projects more digestible to everyone.

Homebrew is pretty sweet. I’ve been very pleased with easily keeping my OSX system up to date since it was released; no more Fink/MacPorts, it’s automatable, it just works (well, as long as you keep installing the latest XCode or OSX Command Line Tools).

You are using Homebrew to install and update all your programs, right? If not, checkout the homepage now.

However, when just following the Homebrew repo on GitHub, I think keeping up to date with what is “new” with Homebrew has always been hard. Maybe I haven’t paid enough attention or read enough of the man pages.