Blog of Rob Galanakis (@robgalanakis)

Archive for March, 2014

What if Carl Sagan were a hack?

I was watching the first episode of Cosmos, and Neil deGrasse Tyson talked some about how stellar of a scientists Carl Sagan was and what an impact Carl had on Neil personally. Carl’s abilities were important for his advocacy, because a) it lent him credibility, and b) it allowed...

Read more

Planet Mars, the simple feed aggregator

In December, I spent some time polishing up a new fork of the old PlanetPlanet Python feed aggregator, named Planet Mars: https://github.com/rgalanakis/planet-mars . I chose the name to contrast it with Planet Venus, a successful PlanetPlanet fork. My goal for Planet Mars is to make it as simple as possible,...

Read more

Why I love blogging

I started to write a post about how I missed multithreading and speed going from C# to Python. I ended up realizing the service we built which inspired the post was poorly designed and took far more effort than it should have. The speed and multithreading of C# made...

Read more

Configuration in Host the Docs

With Host the Docs, I chose to eschew configuration files and use a sphinx-style “conf.py” approach (I have previously written about how I like this approach). If a conf.py file is found, it is used for configuration, allowing it to override default configuration options. I also allow configuration through...

Read more

“What did you learn?”

When something bad happens to someone (firing, demotion, bad review, big failure), it’s natural for managers to ask that person “what did you learn?“* Unfortunately the answer is rarely what a manager wants to hear, and it’s also largely useless.** Asking the question phrases it as the employee’s problem,...

Read more

Introducing Host The Docs

A month or so ago I created Host the Docs, and it’s been quietly running at work some success, so I figure it’s time to talk about it. The code is on GitHub at https://github.com/rgalanakis/hostthedocs, and here’s a description from the readme: Host the Docs is a simple way...

Read more

Who is using PyPy?

I brought up the idea of using PyPy for an internal service we are building at work, and was asked what actual projects are using PyPy? I had no answer and couldn’t find one. Are there are well known projects using PyPy? Do you know of anyone that is...

Read more

Being amazed by software development

I am continually amazed by the state of software development. I am amazed at how broken things seem to be, and I’m amazed at what powerful tools we have to fix things. A few weeks ago, I struggled to find a documentation hosting solution. We have an internal version...

Read more