I write all my books using LaTeX. Parts of LaTeX are (at first) confusing.

Recently, I had a moment of despair when my LaTeX processing tools no longer worked.

Q: "Can you recommend books that are good for a beginner wanting to learn python?"

Me: "Depends on the person’s background..."

Q: "They has a deep background in the problem domain. Recently they've been doing a lot of reporting and analytics using SQL."

Okay. That's excellent.

One of the …

The back-story. See Coping With Complexity. See https://github.com/cloud-custodian/cel-python for the code base.

I've reached the point where progress is clearly impossible. A bad decision a few weeks ago has reached it's inevitable conclusion. I've made a terrible mistake. About 1,000 lines of code -- and tons …

See Programming Languages I've Learned (more-or-less in order) [Update].

This came up on Twitter and Fosstodon.

See https://fosstodon.org/@vpavlyshyn/109908255464181943 and https://fosstodon.org/@slott56/109908527412493172.

I omitted a few things from the list because -- well -- there are a LOT of languages.

For example, in the 90's I …

For social contact, I'm generally following people on https://fosstodon.org/home. I'm https://fosstodon.org/@slott56.

Or @slott56@fosstodon.org <https://fosstodon.org/@slott56> as they say in the Fediverse.

But I saw some stuff on Twitter that was disheartening.

I thought Python🐍wasn't strongly typed.🤔 But this code …

As the olds do, I reminisce sometimes. Not often. Let me rewind the memory tapes a back to 1967 or '68.

(What a dumb metaphor for folks who have never used serial storage.)

This isn't -- directly -- about Python. But it may help folks who live at the edge of programming …

I know folks who struggle with the core concepts of writing software. Some of them are IT professionals. With jobs. They can't really code. It seems like they don't understand it. Maybe a gentler introduction to programming will help? I have my doubts. The folks who seem to struggle the …

The emphasis on code is important. Code defines the behavior of systems -- for the most part Once upon a time, we used clever mechanical designs, or discrete electronic components. The InternetofThings idea exists because high-powered general-purposes CPU's are ubiquitous.

A DevOps mantra is "infrastructure as code". The entire deployment is …

Warning: Long Boring Anecdote: Conclusions will be drawn from a single example.

First, this quote:

"All your suggestions were great if I had wanted to do a systematic study and truly understand. The goal is to understand and learn as little as possible to be able to undertake the code …