Any useful programming language provides a means to implement composite data types, ie. data types built as a composition of primitive and other composite data types. Python provides many ways to implement these structures, but I want to write about how to do this using named tuples and dataclasses.
The …
read moreI just read a fantastic article about the "Make Invalid States Unrepresentable" principle. I have never heard of this principle by name, but I have seen code several times which violates this principle and it makes reading and understanding it incredibly more difficult.
To quickly summarise this article, the core …
read moreI recently came across an excellent blog post which has some suggestions on interesting short-term coding projects. I think these projects are a fun way to learn a new language (lately, I've been interested in learning Nim and Ocaml, for reasons that I'll try to explain some other time).
For …
read moreSending files around a network always seems to be difficult for some reason. But Python has a built-in utility that makes this much easier. Simply run this at the command line:
python3 -m http.server 8080
Python will start an HTTP server on port 8080 and it will serve all …
read moreI had never before had to set up an alternate input method for myself. However, today, my wife asked me to help her do so.
An input method helps users type characters in other languages. Two popular input method frameworks are IBus and fcitx. In this example, I'll show how …
read morePython is my favourite language. Some find it surprising that my preferred editor for coding is not an IDE, but vim. Not even vim with plugins, but vim with very few customisations. This won't be an in-depth post on how I use vim - that would take me too long to …
read moreHere is a very helpful but difficult-to-remember portion of configuration taken from my .vimrc file:
highlight ExtraWhitespace ctermbg=lightred guibg=lightred
autocmd VimEnter,InsertEnter * syn match ExtraWhitespace /\s\+$/ containedin=ALL
highlight Tabs ctermbg=lightgreen guibg=lightgreen
autocmd VimEnter,InsertEnter * syn match Tabs /\t/ containedin=ALL
The above lines …
read moreBehold, my .vimrc file!
set nojoinspaces
set bg=dark
set sw=2
set ts=2
set sts=2
set ruler
set ffs=unix
map Q q
map q: :
map Y y$
let g:leave_my_textwidth_alone=1
let g:python_recommended_style=0
set expandtab
set nojoinspaces
set hlsearch …Here is an example of code samples in a Pelican post:
print("Hello world!")
And here is how one writes it in a post:
:::python
print("Hello world!")
And I created the last block like so:
:::markdown
:::python
print("Hello world!")
I will not include another block explaining how I …
read moreI want to write a short post on why I feel that document typesetters are advantageous to using document processors for generating publications. This is not meant to be a persuasive essay. Rather, I just wanted to take a moment here to comprehensively describe some technical reasons why I prefer …
read moreI decided this past weekend to set up email my on own domain. My previous post detailed why I decided to do this. Now I'll explain how I implented it and why I made some of the choices that I did.
My DNS is registered using Gandi, and they provide …
read moreIt has long been a priority of mine to migrate my email addresses to my own domain name. My reasons for doing this are quite numerous:
Email is probably our most intimate form of communication, and I am growing increasingly uncomfortable about using external services like Gmail to host it …
I created this website using Pelican. I think it's absolutely fantastic. Pelican belongs to a class of software called static site generators. Static site generators are pieces of software which allow users to write articles using very simple markup languages such as Markdown, or Restructured Text and generate them into …
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