Chad Dotson – Page 3 – Computer Scientist / Software Engineer

Creating Downloadable CSV (Or Any Other) Files In Browser With JavaScript

By chad October 25, 2015Programming, Software Engineering, Technology, TipsNo Comments

Many of us have wanted to create downloadable content straight from the browser. I remember several years back where it was more difficult and the solutions were not clean. Today, it is much much more simple and clean. Enter Blob URLs. In this example, I have an object of arrays. …

"On The Job Training" vs "On The Job Learning"

By chad September 13, 2015Key Concepts, Programming, Software EngineeringNo Comments

A career in programming consists more of "on the job learning" than "on the job training." Training Training as something someone else teaches you to do. There may or may not be any real expectation of advancing the concepts covered in the training. The analogy would be that if you…

Installing Technical Analysis Library for Python

By chad August 23, 2015Programming2 Comments

I'm tinkering with some financial analysis scripts so when I got to looking into some useful python packages, Technical Anaysis Library popped up. The python bindings require the TA Lib (Technical Analysis Library) which on osx is available via homebrew. Now, when I originally installed I didn't want to install…

Authorizing a twitter-bot

By chad August 16, 2015Programming, Programming Live BlogNo Comments

So last night I ran into a small issue, how to authorize a twitter bot to use an application without stubbing together a website and logging in with the bot account? The answer, this little script using twython: import twython app_key = raw_input("Your app key: ") app_secret = raw_input("Your app…

Virtualenvwrapper / Updating Tools

By chad August 15, 2015Programming Live Blog, TipsNo Comments

If you are using virtualenvwrapper with the default version of python on your system (OSX in particular) and I recommend updating pip and setuptools as part of your postmkvirtualenv hook. Just add the following line to YOURVIRTUALENVDIRECTORY/postmkvirtualenv. pip install -U pip setuptools

Don't use parse_requirements in your code

By chad August 15, 2015Programming, Programming Live BlogNo Comments

I just ran into trouble while building a setuptools package. Specifically, I was using pip.req.parse_requirements to process package dependencies from a requirements.txt file and noticed that upgrading pip would break my code. Upon further investigation, I found out that they(authors of pip) do not guarantee the api of their internal…

Thoughts on MVP

By chad July 30, 2015Programming, Software Engineering, TechnologyNo Comments

We all know that getting to a minimum viable product (MVP) is a race. It is a race against competition, market need, industry direction, etc, etc etc. I came to a realization recently that reaching MVP can also be a race against yourself and how long your technological choices hold…

The Python "in" Operator – Theoretical vs Actual Time Complexity

By chad July 20, 2015Doing Things Better, Programming, Software Engineering, TipsNo Comments

Background Sometimes we may generate or retrieve a list, set or even dict when creating collection of things that we will be testing against. Theoretically a set, frozenset or dictionary should be the fastest (and equivalent) forms of storage for this operation. However, what I've found is that on some…

Python Logger

By chad June 29, 2015Doing Things Better, Programming, Software Engineering, Technology, TipsNo Comments

The Scenario This scenario illustrates two possible mistakes people make when using the python logging module. Analyze the following code and look for issues. try: ... except SomeException as e: logger.error("Some meaningful error message. message={0}".format(e.message)) So what is wrong with that? First and foremost, the code fails to use the…

Estill Springs Fireworks 2015

By chad June 29, 2015PhotographyNo Comments

These are photos taken at the Estill Springs, TN 2015 Fireworks show. The Best The Rest