For the last week I've been working with some legacy code that reveals a kind of problem I hadn't really seen before.

I'm calling it the Wrong Abstraction.

I want to contrast this with the Leaky Abstraction, where implementation details are revealed and raise havoc.

The Wrong Abstraction problem seems …

Had a question about an enumerated set of constant values. "Where do I put these constants?" they asked. It was clear what they wanted. This is another variation on their personal quest which can be called "I want Python to have CONST or Final." It's kind of tedious when a …

1. I can't teach myself data science on my crappy old Windows machine.
2. I've decided to get a new Windows machine. Here are the specs.

In the mailbag I found this nonsense, doomed to inevitable failure:

"As I get more serious about this data science stuff, it has become obvious that a windows machine is not the way to go. ... Q1: What other things should I think about and consider while shopping for a new …

Higher-Order Functions. A really cool idea. Javascript isn't my favorite language. https://medium.freecodecamp.org/higher-order-functions-in-javascript-d9101f9cf528 This, on the other hand, is huge: trunk-based development. https://codeburst.io/trunk-based-development-vs-git-flow-a0212a6cae64 I'm really tired of having a dev branch with periodic commits to master so we can deploy from master. It's so …

In a way, this is about an epic fail attempting copy-and-paste coding. But really, this is about thinking outside the box. The issue -- to me -- comes from failing to see the box. Here's the body of the email, edited slightly.

"...how determine when a file has completed downloading. It would …

The three unsolvable problems in computing:

• Naming
• Distributed Cache Coherence
• Off-By-One Errors

Let's talk about naming.

The project team decided to call the server component "FlaskAPI".

Seriously.

It serves information about two kinds of resources: images and running instances of images. (Yes, it's a kind of kubernetes/dockyard lite that …

Background: https://medium.com/capital-one-developers/bashing-the-bash-replacing-shell-scripts-with-python-d8d201bc0989

And this

I wonder how/why python did not pick up some sort/form of pipe operator. 🤨 (although coroutine does have .send method 🤔)

—Ivan Pejić (@nadrimajstor) August 26, 2017

The answer to this is interesting because there are two kinds of parallelism. I like …

https://medium.com/@s_lott Plus, of course, lots of other stuff from lots of other folks. Enjoy.