Blog of Rob Galanakis (@robgalanakis)

Archive for November, 2012

Python Singletons

In my opinion, good python libraries and frameworks should spend effort guiding you towards the ‘pit of success’, rather than trying to keep you from failing. They do this by spending most effort on things related to the critical path- clear interfaces, simple implementations, thorough documentation. Which is why...

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Taking your dog to Iceland

In late 2011, my wife and I imported our Boston Terrier, Shoni, to Iceland. Since importing pets commonly comes up on foreigner discussions, I thought I’d dedicate a post to our experiences (sorry, no tech writing today!). I’ll also mention, this is specifically for dogs, at the time we...

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Is QA a good stepping stone?

I’ve always heard that it was difficult to move from QA into development (game design/programming/art/production). I thought this was smart- QA people should be there to be QA people, not doing a job only because they hope it would lead to something else. And at some companies, it works....

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Teaching python decorators

A few weeks ago, I held a demo about context managers and decorators. Teaching context managers was straightforward, as expected. Decorators, however, are a much more complex concept. So I used Steve Ferg’s article about the right way to explain python decorators. This was a live demo with little preparation...

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PSA: It isn’t dark magic, it’s your anti-virus software

We’ve all had it- sometimes, under certain conditions, your code errors with an IOError because Windows can’t delete a file. It seems random, and it is. Well, in case you weren’t aware, it’s almost definitely your anti virus software (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/09/07/10347136.aspx) or at least, some other crazy shit going on....

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