Programming – Chad Dotson

Installing PyAudio on macOS

By chad March 16, 2019ProgrammingNo Comments

Installing pyaudio on macOS is almost straightforward, except that you need portaudio installed. The easiest way to remedy this is to use homebrew. If you have your homebrew installing in the recomended location it is as simple as the following: brew install portaudio pipenv install pyaudio However if you have…

Working with bytes in Python 3

By chad January 14, 2019Programming, Software EngineeringNo Comments

Background Sometimes you find yourself needing to work at the byte-level in an application you are working on. I feel that in Python there are not enough examples of how to do this. There is also a lot of potential to over-complicate the solution. This Example I plan to cover…

Python CSV Module Oddity

By chad September 9, 2018Programming, Software EngineeringNo Comments

A Python Oddity I was using Python to encode a CSV file using a custom dialect recently when I noticed something odd. I noticed that the csv writer class takes an optional argument that enables you to change the line terminator. That's ok, however, the csv reader class does not…

Thoughts On Team Communication

By chad July 4, 2017Doing Things Better, Software EngineeringNo Comments

Awhile back I had some thoughts on communication. If you've ever played World of Tanks Blitz you'd know that basically its a team of tanks against another team of tanks. With the pick up, fast paced nature communication is minimal at best (sometimes limited to a single "<<<<<<<<<" or ">>>>>>>>>"…

Odd Behavior in Python 2.7

By chad April 20, 2016ProgrammingNo Comments

I was tinkering around with replacing the print statement with the print function in a Python 2 script when I ran across this peculiar oddity. >>> from __future__ import print_function as print File "<stdin>", line 1 from __future__ import print_function as print ^ SyntaxError: invalid syntax >>> from __future__ import…

You're Too Close

By chad December 9, 2015Doing Things Better, Programming, TipsNo Comments

Have you encountered the following scenario? You are trying to solve a problem (or helping solve a problem) and know or at least think you know the solution. You are in the middle of implementing it when someone else looks at it and says, "why don't you do it this…

Python Logging – Best Practices

By chad November 25, 2015Doing Things Better, Key Concepts, Programming, Software Engineering, TechnologyNo Comments

The python logging module offers a wide variety of logging options and handlers. One thing missing from the documentation is when to use each level. A quick foreword You really should familiarize yourself with the logging package. How to create new loggers (I find creating them by module very useful). …

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…

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…