June 09, 2017 [Programming, Python, Tech] By default, when you make a UTC date from a Unix timestamp in Python and print it in ISO format, it has no time zone: $ python3 >>> from datetime import datetime >>> datetime.utcfromtimestamp(1496998804).isoformat() '2017-06-09T09:00:04' Whenever you talk about a datetime, I…

June 12, 2017 [Performance, Programming, Python, Tech] Series: asyncio basics, large numbers in parallel, parallel HTTP requests, adding to stdlib Update: slides of a talk I gave at the London Python Meetup on this: Talk slides: Making 100 million HTTP requests with Python aiohttp. Update: see how Cristian…

For when git status is not enough, I wrote git what: If you often have a few branches on the go, it could be useful. PakarPBN A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily…

June 27, 2017 [Performance, Programming, Programming Languages, Python] Series: asyncio basics, large numbers in parallel, parallel HTTP requests, adding to stdlib In the previous post I demonstrated how the limited_as_completed method allows us to run a very large number of tasks using concurrency, but limiting the number of…

June 27, 2017 [Programming, Python, Tech] For my attempt to improve the asyncio.as_completed Python standard library function I needed to build a local copy of cpython (the Python interpreter). To test it, I needed the aiohttp module, which is not part of the standard library, so the easiest…

June 29, 2017 [Tech] On Wednesday 28th June 2017 a group of people from OpenMarket went to the Fora office space in Clerkenwell, London to run a workshop with the Women Who Code group, who work to help women achieve their career goals. OpenMarket provided the workshop “Write…

July 23, 2017 [Programming, Python, Raspberry Pi, Tech] Today at the Egham Raspberry Pi Jam we did two things: 1. The Broken Levels Challenge Some nasty person came and broke our levels for our game Rabbit Escape and we need you to fix them! To play this game…

August 07, 2017 [Programming, Python] If you want “tomorrow” in Python datetimes, don’t construct a datetime like this: from datetime import datetime, timedelta td = datetime.today() tm1 = datetime(td.year, td.month, td.day + 1, 14, 0, 0) # Don't do this! Because it will work sometimes, but fail when…

Last time we started a JezzBall clone by allowing you to move a cursor around the screen and draw lines across the playing area. This time, we add balls bouncing around. Will we get far enough for them to collide with the walls? The code is at Follow…

September 12, 2017 [ACCU] I used to run Planet Code using Venus but that started breaking recently with 500 errors for SNI-enabled sites, and it looks very unmaintained. I considered some other static aggregators, but on shared hosting it’s hard to get the right Ruby version and gems…