Category: Programming

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Programming Reading Material

Get $411 worth of Python books for $18 with this Humble Bundle!

Once a year, Humble Bundle releases a bundle of No Starch Press’ excellent Python books, and it’s that time of year again! For the next 18 days from the time of this writing, you can get $411 worth of ebooks for as little as $18.

What you get for $1

The bundle is sold in tiers. If you pay only $1, you get this portion of the bundle, which makes for a great starter set for younger readers or if you’re thinking of getting into game development:

If these books alone for a dollar have piqued your interest, you can get them now by going to the Humble Bundle Python book page.

If a dollar is all you can spare, you’ll still be well-served by this deal. However, if you can spend a little more, the deal gets better…

What you get for $10 – $17.99

Pay between $10 and $17.99, and they’ll add these to the bundle:

In my opinion, the stand-out book in this tier is Serious Python, which cover languages features, tools, and techniques that you’ll need as you start writing applications that you or your customers will regularly use and rely upon.

If $17.99 is the most you can spare, you’re still getting a good deal, and you can go to the Humble Bundle Python book page and get your bundle now.

However, if you can part with $18 or more, you should read on…

What you get for $18 or more

And finally, if you pay $18 or more, they’ll throw in the gems of the collection:

If you’re serious about learning Python, you’ll want to pay $18 or more I used Python Crash Course and Automate the Boring Stuff with Python in the Python courses I taught last year.

Even though I bought the 2020 edition of this bundle, I bought the 2021 edition just to get Real World Python is a great way to learn some new tricks through its tour of algorithms and Python libraries. It was cheaper to buy the bundle than to buy Real World Python on its own. Do the math: You can pay $28 for Real World Python, or get all the books in the bundle for $10 less!

Beyond the Basic Stuff with Python is a great guide for writing more Pythonic code, Python One-Liners is worth it for just the NumPy and regex chapters alone, and Natural Language Processing with Python and spaCY packs an NLP course with lots of practical exercises into under 200 pages.

If the $18 bundle is what you’re looking for, go to Humble Bundle and get it while it’s still available!

The money goes to good causes

The proceeds from sales of this bundle go to:

The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers. The majority of the PSF’s work is focused on empowering and supporting people within the Python community. The PSF has active grant programs that support sprints, conferences, meetups, user groups, and Python development efforts all over the world. In addition, the PSF underwrites and runs PyCon US, the primary Python community conference. Being part of the PSF means being part of the Python community. Recently we changed the PSF to an open membership organization, so that everyone who uses and supports Python can join.

To learn more, visit https://www.python.org/psf/membership.

The No Starch Press Foundation is an IRS 501 (c) (3) tax-exempt non-profit corporation created to support and grow the collective knowledge and contributions of the worldwide hacker community.

We support hackers of all types, regardless of experience — whether that’s the passionate beginner or the lifelong hacker wishing to make a broader contribution to the hacker community and the world.

The Foundation was formed to give back to and strengthen the hacking community. The Foundation’s founder, William Pollock, has been closely involved with the hacking community since about 1999 and much of the success of his company, No Starch Press, is due to the support of the worldwide hacking community. To date, Pollock has given over $800,000 to the Foundation and is working to expand its donor base. The Foundation’s funding will be used to help strengthen and expand the hacking community, by educating the public about hacking and working to create safe and central places for the hacking community.

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Current Events Programming Tampa Bay

“Python: A Bicycle for the Mind” — 9:00 a.m. this Wednesday at the Women Who Code Tampa online meetup!

I’m talking about Python at this Wednesday’s Women Who Code Tampa online event!

This Wednesday, May 12th, from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. Eastern (UTC-4), I’ll be in an online session where I’ll talk about using Python as a “bicycle for the mind”. I’m going to present a couple of Python tricks that I actually use to be more productive.

This session is this week’s installment of Women Who Code Tampa’s Coffee + Code, a weekly online networking event featuring a tech topic.

Here are the relevant links:

What’s this about “Bicycle for the mind”?

It’s how Steve Jobs describes computers in his appearance in a 1990 documentary film called Memory & Imagination: New Pathways to the Library of Congress.

Here’s what he said:

I think one of the things that really separates us from the high primates is that we’re tool builders. I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet.

The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. And, humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud a showing for the crown of creation. So, that didn’t look so good.

But, then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And, a man on a bicycle, a human on a bicycle, blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts.

And that’s what a computer is to me. What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.

Categories
Podcasts Programming

What’s on Tampa Bay’s sci/tech podcasts (May 2021 edition)

Once again, it’s time to list Tampa Bay podcasts that you, the Global Nerdy reader, might find informative, interesting, and illuminating!

In the last list, I listed the podcasts from newest to longest-running. This time, I’m listing them from longest-running to newest:

  1. Thunder Nerds
  2. The 6 Figure Developer
  3. The Mike Dominick Show
  4. Friends That Code
  5. Space and Things

And now, the podcasts…

Thunder Nerds

Of the podcasts in this roundup, Thunder Nerds — “A conversation with the people behind the technology, that love what they do… and do tech good” — has been around the longest, with 279 episodes over five seasons to date. You’ve probably seen the hosts at local meetups and conferences; they’re Frederick Philip Von Weiss and Brian Hinton.

Auth0 logoThunder Nerds is sponsored by a company that’s near and dear to me, Auth0! That’s partly because they have a great authentication, authorization, and identity service, and partly because I work there in my role as a Senior R&D Content Engineer!

Here are Thunder Nerds’ podcasts since the last time I did a roundup of Tampa Bay podcasts:

279 – 💡 Super Friendly Design Systems with Dan Mall — In this episode, we get to speak with Dan Mall : Co-founder and CEO of Arcade, and Founder & CEO of SuperFriendly. We discuss the origins of SuperFriendly, Arcade, the “Get It Out of Your System‬” podcast, and more.

I’ll be recording an episode with the Thunder Nerds this Thursday!

This Thursday, I’ll chat with Brian and Frederick about  all sorts of developments since the last time I chatted with them, not the least of which is how their podcast was a key part of the research I did to land my job at Auth0.

I’m sure that a good chunk of our conversation will be about what working at Auth0 is like, authentication and authorization, the hardware and electronic music dabbling that I’ve been doing lately, and maybe even what my ideas for a post-lockdown world are.

The Thunder Nerds record their podcasts in such a way that you can watch the recording process LIVE on YouTube, and can even type in questions or comments as it’s happening! If you’d like to see how the sausage is made, follow this link next Thursday evening at 7:30 p.m. EDT and watch the fun!

The 6 Figure Developer

At the time I’m writing this, The 6 Figure Developer — hosted by John Callaway, Clayton Hunt, and Jon Ash — has posted 178 episodes. It’s…

…a show dedicated to helping developers to grow their career. Topics include Test Driven Development, Clean Code, Professionalism, Entrepreneurship, as well as the latest and greatest programming languages and concepts.

Here are The 6 Figure Developer’s podcasts since the last time I did a roundup of Tampa Bay podcasts:

  • Episode 193 — Software Coaching with GeePaw Hill — GeePaw Hill is a coach – a professional harvester of the value of change — in the software development industry. A geek for forty years, he’s spent the last two decades helping individuals, teams, and organizations take steps to become closer to who or how they wish to be.
  • Episode 192 — Blazor with Carl Franklin — Carl Franklin is Executive Vice President of App vNext, a software development firm focused on modern methodologies and technologies. Carl is a 20+ year veteran of the software industry, co-host and founder of .NET Rocks!, the first and most widely listened to podcast for .NET developers, a Microsoft MVP for Developer Technologies, and Senior Executive of Pwop Studios, a full-service audio and video production/post production studio located in Southeastern Connecticut.
  • Episode 191 — Scrum with Dr. Jeff Sutherland — After 11 years in the military he became a doctor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. Sutherland contributed to the creation of the Agile Manifesto in 2001. Along with Ken Schwaber, he wrote and maintains The Scrum Guide, which contains the official definition of the framework.
  • Episode 190 — Microservices with Sean Whitesell —Sean is a Microsoft MVP, ASP Insider, Technical Reviewer, and Cloud Architect at TokenEx.
  • Episode 189 — Reactive DDD with Vaughn Vernon — Vaughn Vernon is an entrepreneur, software developer, and architect with more than 35 years of experience in a broad range of business domains. Vaughn is a leading expert in Domain-Driven Design and Reactive, and champions simplicity. He consults and teaches around Domain-Driven Design and Reactive software development, helping teams and organizations realize the potential of business-driven and reactive systems as they transform from technology-driven legacy web implementation approaches. Vaughn is the author of three books: Implementing Domain-Driven Design, Reactive Messaging Patterns with the Actor Model, and Domain-Driven Design Distilled, all published by Addison-Wesley.
  • Episode 188 — Designing for Scale with James Avery — James is the Founder and CEO of Kevel, previously known as Adzerk. Kevel is the next generation of publisher ad serving; offering the infrastructure APIs needed to quickly build custom ad platforms for sponsored listings, internal promotions, native ads, and more. It’s built to be faster, easier to use, and more comprehensive than anything on the market today.

The Mike Dominick Show

The Mike Dominick Show is the second-newest of the podcasts in this list, and it has an open source focus.

His most recent podcasts:

Friends That Code

Friends That Code is hosted by Mike Traverso, whom locals may know from the Tampa Bay Google Developers Group meetup and other Google-y events. In this podcast, he showcases…

…some amazing people I know that just happen to write code for a living. Whether they started off intending to code or just happened into it, we get to hear about the types of people you’ll meet, things you’ll get to do, jobs you’ll have along the way, and advice from some awesome coders along the way!

Here are Friends That Code’s podcasts since the last time I did a roundup of Tampa Bay podcasts:

Space and Things

Space and Things is the newest podcast on this list, and it has the distinction of being the only one here that isn’t about software development. Instead, it’s about…well, you get three guesses. Just read its name.

Space and Things features two hosts:

  • Emily Carney: A veteran of the United States Navy, Carney became a freelance writer back in 2008 and started a blog called This Space Available, which is hosted by the National Space Society.In 2011, Carney founded a facebook group Space Hipsters, of which I am a member. Originally intended to be a place to share news and insights amongst friends, this community has now grown to close to 20,000 members including astronauts, engineers, scientists, historians and space flight enthusiasts from around the globe.
  • Dave Giles: Giles is a singer/songwriter from London, England who has always had a passion for space flight. Since his early years he’s been looking skyward and though he ended up wielding a guitar for a living, space exploration is alway on his mind and one of his most popular songs is about astronaut Gene Cernan, ‘The Last Man On The Moon’.In 2019 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, Giles visited all of the crewed space vehicles flown by NASA from Freedom 7 to the Space Shuttle Orbiters.

Here are Space and Things’ podcasts since the last time I did a roundup of Tampa Bay podcasts:

  • Remembering Michael Collins — We decided we needed to record an extra podcast to celebrate the life of Michael Collins, who died on Wednesday 28th April at the age of 90.
  • STP 35 — This week we talk about a true unsung hero. Gerard K. O’Neill. His work about space colonies was truly ground breaking and his book ‘The High Frontier’ is one of the most inspiring there is. O’Neill is the subject of a new movie, ‘The High Frontier – The Untold Story Of Gerard K. O’Neill’ and we’re joined by three members of the production team to discuss O’Neill and the movie: Director Ryan Stuit; writer and producer Will Henry; and executive producer Dylan Taylor.
  • STP 34 — April 22nd is Earth Day, so today we are joined by BluShift Aerospace CEO Sascha Deri and communications director Seth Lockman to talk to us about what they’re doing to try and kickstart the conversations in the aerospace industry about sustainability and using non toxic biofuels.
  • STP 33 — This week we take a look at the very first Space Shuttle mission which took place on April 12th 1981. To do this we’re joined by the wonderful author David Hitt who wrote the book ‘Bold They Rise: The Space Shuttle Early Years’.
  • STP 32 — On April 12th it’s the 60th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first spaceflight, so we asked author Stephen Walker to join us. He has just released a wonderful book called ‘Beyond’ all about Gagarin and it’s a belter.
  • STP 31 — Today Lego release a brand new Space Shuttle Discovery set which also includes the Hubble Space Telescope, so we thought it was a great time to talk Lego and space with Charlie Nangle who runs one of our favourite instagram accounts: The Brick Space.
  • STP 30 — On Friday, the news broke that legendary NASA flight director Glynn Lunney had passed away aged 84. We spend some time talking about his finest moments and do our best to pay tribute to one of our heroes. To do this we’re joined by author of “Go, Flight! The Unsung Heroes of Mission Control” – Rick Houston.
Categories
Programming Reading Material

Humble Bundle’s “Ultimate Python Bookshelf” bundle is available until Monday afternoon!

At the time this article was published, there are 3 days and 21 hours remaining to get Humble Bundle’s “Ultimate Python Bookshelf” bundle. Depending on how much you’re willing to spend, you can get 3, 8, or 24 books at a deeply discounted price, and some of the money goes to two worthy charities. Read on to find out more…

The books

Depending on how much you pay, you’ll get 3, 8 or 24 books.

If you pay $1 – $9.99, you get these books:

  • The Python Workshop
  • The Statistics and Calculus with Python Workshop
  • Web Development with Django

If you pay $10 – $17.99, you get the books above, along with:

  • Hands-on Exploratory Data Analysis with Python
  • Hands-on Machine Learning with scikit-learn and Scientific Python Toolkits
  • Django 3 by Example
  • Python Automation Cookbook
  • Hands-on Genetic Algorithms with Python

And if you pay $18 or more, you get all the books above, plus:

  • Python Data Cleaning Cookbook
  • Deep Reinforcement Learning with Python
  • Data Engineering with Python
  • Modern Python Cookbook
  • Applying Math with Python
  • Python Image Processing Cookbook
  • Python Feature Engineering
  • Practical Python Programming for IoT
  • Python Algorithmic Trading Cookbook
  • Applied Computational Thinking with Python
  • Hands-on Python Natural Language Processing
  • Hands-on Simulation Modeling with Python
  • Mastering Python Networking
  • Artificial Intelligence with Python
  • Python for Finance Cookbook
  • Quantum Computing with Python and IBM Quantum Experience

Interested? You can order the bundle here.

The causes

All Humble Bundles route some of each bundle’s price to one or more charities. In the case of The Ultimate Python Bookshelf bundle, there are two charities that will benefit:

Doctors Without Borders / Médécins Sans Froniteres: An international, independent medical humanitarian organization that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, natural and man-made disasters, and exclusion from health care in nearly 70 countries.

Stop AAPI Hate: A national coalition addressing anti-Asian racism across the U.S. The coalition was founded by the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council (A3PCON), Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA) and San Francisco State University’s Asian American Studies Department. Between March 19, 2020 and February 28, 2021, Stop AAPI Hate has received 3,795 reported incidents of racism and discrimination targeting Asian Americans across the U.S..

Wait a minute — there are Packt books. Are they worth getting?

As you were reading this article, you were probably wondering about the issue of the less-than-stellar reputation of Packt’s books and if I was going to raise the issue.

Consider the issue raised, Gentle Reader.

When they were starting out, it seemed that Packt took whatever author they could get to write about the hot tech topics of the moment and rushed those books to market. Over the years, the quality of their authors, review process, and books seems to have improved. I know for a fact that Tampa-based iOS developer Craig Clayton has written some excellent books on iOS development for Packt — because I bought them all.

I decided to buy the bundle. I paid the recommended $25 for these reasons:

  • Some of the money goes to two good causes.
  • At $25 for 24 books, that’s less than $1.05 per book.
  • I’m at the point where I won’t even notice a “missing” $25.
  • I don’t consider it $25 spent, but $25 invested.

That last point requires a deeper explanation:

  • If at least a handful of these books are good and provide me with something that I can use at work, in my own programming projects, or in my articles, I will have collected a good return on my investment.
  • Even if most of them are bad, it will still be a worthwhile investment because the 25 books span a wide array of Python topics, and will give me a better idea of what I don’t know, and better still, what I don’t know I don’t know. I can then look for better sources of information.

As I go through each of these books, I’ll post my findings and opinions here.

How to order the bundle

Once again, Humble Bundle’s “Ultimate Python Bookshelf” bundle is available until Monday, April 26 at 2:00 p.m. EDT (UTC-4). If you wanted to learn Python, sharpen your Python skills, or expand your knowledge of where you can apply Python, this bundle is worth considering.

Categories
Current Events Programming Tampa Bay

I’m giving away my Python tricks at “Women Who Code Tampa” next month

Next month, on May 12th from 9:00 to 10:00 a.m. Eastern, I’m going to facilitate an online “Coffee and Code” session with the Women Who Code Tampa meetup, and according to the event description, I’ll be talking about Python.

But it’ll be a little bit more than just Python. It’ll be about using Python to automate certain tasks and assist you in others.

You can learn a lot about a programming language from the coding projects featured in tutorials, but sometimes, that problems tackled in those projects can seem as if they don’t apply to the the kinds of problems that you’d like to tackle with code.

In the upcoming “Coffee and Code”, I’m going to show you how I use Python and Jupyter Notebooks to automate certain tasks to give me more time during the day and make those tasks less error-prone.

Consider the list of Tampa Bay tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events that I publish every week (and its companion mailing list). I started publishing a few years ago, and in the beginning, I created it manually, copying and pasting text and links from Meetup.com and other places.

In the beginning, there weren’t that many events in the area, and putting the list together would take about an hour. As Tampa Bay’s tech scene grew bigger, more events came up, and creating the list grew into a task that could easily take up two or three hours — sometimes even longer.

That’s when I decided to create a couple of Python scripts to speed up the process. I’ll show you how I put those scripts together, and even give you to the code so that you can tinker with it and create your own tools to automate your life and make it easier.

That’s my plan — to show you how I think when I’m trying to use Python to automate processes and solve problems in my everyday life and work, and give you concrete code examples that you can use, modify, experiment with, and learn from!

Join me at the Women Who Code Tampa meetup on Thursday, May 12 at 9:00 EDT and see how you can use Python as an everyday assistant!

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Programming

Friday 5: Useful things for coders (April 2, 2021 edition)

Every Friday, I publish the Friday 5, a list of 5 links to useful things for coders.

In this week’s Friday 5: a closer look at JavaScript’s ternary operator, JSON’s interop vulnerabilities, a free Python course on Udemy, reading, editing, and erasing Exif metadata from photos, and questioning a specific kind of interview question.

Rethinking the JavaScript Ternary Operator

JavaScript’s version of the ternary operator — ?:, also known as the “conditional operator”, is examined very thoroughly in this article. It goes beyond the standard “avoid it; it makes your code hard to read” advice, and shows cases where it does make your code easier to read, reason about, and maintain.

Check it out: Rethinking the JavaScript Ternary Operator

An Exploration of JSON Interoperability Vulnerabilities

“TL;DR: The same JSON document can be parsed with different values across microservices, leading to a variety of potential security risks. If you prefer a hands-on approach, try the labs and when they scare you, come back and read on.”

Check it out: An Exploration of JSON Interoperability Vulnerabilities

Get the Automate the Boring Stuff with Python course for free!

For a limited time only — that is, until Sunday, April 4, you can get the Udemy course based on the book Automate the Boring Stuff with Python for free! The book, and hence the course, is quite good; in fact, I used it as one of the texts for the Python courses I taught last year. Just click the link above or use the coupon code APR2021FREE at checkout.

Check it out: The Automate the Boring Stuff with Python course on Udemy — for free!

JavaScript and Photos: Read, Edit, and Erase Location and Other Exif Metadata

I’ll admit it — this article’s mine; I wrote it for work. It covers the use of the Piexifjs JavaScript library to read, edit, and erase the Exif metadata in digital photos.

Check it out: JavaScript and Photos: Read, Edit, and Erase Location and Other Exif Metadata

Why do interviewers ask linked list questions?

It doesn’t happen often in interviews for front-end developers, but I have been asked linked list questions in interviews for native mobile and back-end positions. Mind you, I haven’t actually needed to build a linked list for anything work-related — ever. So why do interviewers ask linked list questions?

Check it out: Why do interviewers ask linked list questions?

Categories
Programming

Friday 5: Useful things for coders (March 26, 2021 edition)

Every Friday, I publish the Friday 5, a list of 5 links to useful things for coders.

In this week’s Friday 5: a site that catalogs VS Code’s surprising capabilities, a look at the darker corners of Go, background processing in Android, a full-text search in 150 lines of Python, and generating brighter and darker versions of color in JS.

VSCodeCanDoThat.com

Visual Studio Code is a far more capable editor than you might suspect, and the VS Code Can Do That?! can help you discover tips, tricks, and techniques to help you get the most out of this editor.

Each tip/trick/technique comes with a video showing the tip/trick/technique in action and a link to a more detailed description of the tip/trick/technique.

Check it out: VSCodeCanDoThat.com

Darker Corners of Go

The Go (golang) gopher holding a flashlight

Rytis Bieliunas writes:

While simplicity is at the core of Go philosophy you’ll find in further text it nevertheless enables numerous creative ways of shooting yourself in a foot.

Since now I have used Go for production applications for several years and on the account of the many holes in my feet I thought I’d put together a text for the fellow noob students of Go.

My goal is to collect in one place various things in Go that might be surprising to new developers and perhaps shed some light on the more unusual features of Go. I hope that would save the reader lots of Googling and debugging time and possibly prevent some expensive bugs.

Check it out: Darker Corners of Go

Background Processing in Android

Screenshot of Android app doing background processing

Here’s an article from the Auth0 Developer Blog, where I’m one of the writers/editors:

Android apps use the main thread to handle UI updates and operations (like user input). Running long-running operations on the main thread can lead to app freezes, unresponsiveness and thus, poor user experience. To mitigate this, long-running operations should be run in the background. Android has several options for running tasks in the background and in this article, we’ll look at the recommended options for running different types of tasks.

This article uses Java and covers threading, WorkManager, and AlarmManager.

Check it out: Background Processing in Android

Building a full-text search engine in 150 lines of Python code

Flow diagram showing text tokenization

If you’ve wondered how full-text search engines work and thought about building your own, this basic implementation in Python is worth trying out. In this article, you’ll build an engine that searches Wikipedia’s article abstracts and ranks them for relevance, and it’ll do so in milliseconds!

The article covers these major topics:

  • Collecting and formatting the data
  • Indexing the collected data (which includes stemming the words in the data to their basic forms)
  • Searching
  • Ranking results by relevance

Check it out: Building a full-text search engine in 150 lines of Python code

Generate Brighter And Darker Versions Of Color With JavaScript

Chart showing lighter and darker versions of the color redTinyColor is a fantastic JavaScript library that can help you out with a whole bunch of tasks when you’re working with colors. This article takes a quick look at this more-useful-than-you-might-think library.

Check it out: Generate Brighter And Darker Versions Of Color With JavaScript

Are there useful things for coders that should appear in the next edition of Friday 5? Let me know at joey@joeydevilla.com!