tips – Chad Dotson

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). …

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…

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…

Isolate, Understand, Implement

By chad July 18, 2014Doing Things Better, Key Concepts, Programming, Software EngineeringNo Comments

Isolate, understand, implement: three very important things to remember when adding, modifying or replacing features on a project. The first step is to isolate the feature. Hopefully, your project is designed in such a way that once the code is isolated it is in a single place. The next step…