python

A collection of 71 posts

Tech

[Tech] Why is “Database Layer as a REST API” not common?

We have “database APIs” such as abstraction layers over multiple SQL databases and ORMs. But why not take it to the next step and make it a REST API like any other network call that we can make? Advantages would be: * The sharing of database ORM models across multiple programming

A Byte of Python

Everyday reminder about Impact

Everyday I get emails from readers of my books that makes me wonder: Am I continuing to make an impact everyday? Can I have the same impact again through my work? Maybe, let’s see. But still, it’s difficult to top this: I’m a 16-year-old boy from Guangxi,

Tech

Programming Language Adoption

55 people have asked me to write about: Indian companies just don’t take Python seriously, not as much as Perl. Why is that? 28 people have asked me to write about: Most companies opting for Ruby as their programming language of choice instead of Python 51 people have asked

A Byte of Python

Coding Problems for Homework

“Coding Homework” is a small website that I have built to list small problems that one can work on, to learn how to use a new programming language. For example, small problems requiring to read from a file, or to use regular expressions, how to find duplicate files in a

A Byte of Python

An interactive version of A Byte of Python

Roorky is a new startup that has created a new file format and software for interactive books. As part of the default installation of the software, they are bundling A Byte of Python free with the software. What is interesting is that this may help complete beginners who stumble in

A Byte of Python

Interview with CocoaCast

I was recently interviewed by CocoaCast (mp3) to talk about Python for their Mac developer community, as part of their “Unbound Developers” podcast series. I was apprehensive about doing this because I’ve never been live-interviewed before, but in the spirit of doing new things, I went ahead and it

Tech

Why Stack Overflow is useful

In one of my previous thoughts, I had mentioned about a website called “Stack Overflow” in passing. I’m surprised that many people do not know or use this resource and community. Just a brief search over there would answer so many questions that programmers have. For example, there is

A Byte of Python

A Byte of Python in hard copy

If you’re the kind of person who prefers to read a physical book vs. online books, then you’ll be happy to know that the A Byte of Python book is now available as a printed hard copy. The best part is that the hard-working translators can also publish

A Byte of Python

Book updated for Python 3.0

After a gap of 3.5 years, I’ve finally updated the ‘A Byte of Python’ book. The interesting news is that it is updated for the upcoming Python 3.0 language making it probably the first book to be released for Python 3.0. The book is now a

India

Hack Day India

I was at Yahoo! Open Hack Day at Bangalore on Friday and Saturday. 24 hours of hacking, meeting lots of old friends, and sarcasm unlimited. It doesn’t get better than this. * 2007-10-05 Fri 02:30 PM * Arrived at Taj. * Registered myself, got the schwag * Met Raghu and discussed the

Tech

Why students and open source?

Two days before the BMS College Information Science Department Fest called “Genesis 2007”, I received an email from a couple of students asking me to talk about “introduction to open source”. Apparently, they were frantically looking for a speaker. Since I’m not the right person for this, I agreed

Tech

Big Brother

Long ago, I had seen Nat Friedman show off a small Mono app that displayed the amount of time you spent on each application, and updated the chart in real time – so that you could clearly make out how much time you’re spending in the browser and how much

A Byte of Python

Brazilian Portuguese Bytes of Python

Samuel Dias Neto has translated “A Byte of Python” to Brazilian Portuguese. Hats off to Sam! Update on 2011-Sep-01: Link updated

Tech

Mukthi

Today, I talked at Mukthi 6.03 at M S Ramaiah Institute of Technology. First of all, M S Ramaiah is a huge campus. So huge that the students actually tell the teachers that they were late for class because they couldn’t find the class, and that’s a

A Byte of Python

German Bytes of Python

Yesterday, I got this mail from Christoph Zwerschke: Thanks a lot for “A Byte of Python”. Since I thought it would be great if Python gets more popular in German, I participated in the German translation project at BerliOS started by Lutz Horn. Unfortunately, the translation progress stalled last year

A Byte of Python

Byte of Python is now a wiki

In a recent discussion on the byte-of-python list, an enthusiastic bunch of people were interested in seeing A Byte of Python available as a wiki so that readers can contribute directly as well. So, I followed up and made this announcement on the list recently : Hello all, As we have

India

MCC FOSS Day

Yesterday, I talked about Python at the FOSS Day at Mount Carmel College For Women. I was not able to attend the earlier sessions in the day because my team (at work) is making a release soon and as expected, that means crunch time. I managed to make time for

Tech

ShowMeDo

Ian Ozsvald and Kyran Dale have created ShowMeDo.com which is a hub for video tutorials. Very interesting idea! Currently, it has a special emphasis on Python. This should be helpful for beginners and perhaps teach experts a trick or two as well. I found the Debugging with WinPDB video

Tech

Jump

Gopal, I’ve added the jump feature, but sorry, no UI for it :-)

Tech

Django SQLite3 patch

A patch I had submitted to Django for the SQLite3 backend, 3 months ago, finally made it through (suitably modified by Adrian). It was a nice surprise to see my name in the list of contributors :-)

A Byte of Python

foss.in day 2

Today morning, the first session was a Linux Kernel roadmap by Jonathan Corbet. Although I’ve never been a kernel-level guy, the talk was interesting and he clearly explained how features have been added and improved over the various versions, and how the development process has improved and become more

India

foss.in day 1

Today’s the first day of foss.in/2005 and I actually managed to wake up early. When I reached the venue, I saw a looooong queue of people waiting to get into the place. It seems there was a power outage and because of that, they couldn’t do

India

PESIT FOSS Day

Last Thursday (24th November, 2005), there was a FOSS Day at PESIT, my alma mater. Typically, I managed to leave office and reach PESIT at 4.10 when I was supposed to be there at 4. The venue had shifted from the hall in the “new” building to the MCA

India

It’s a small utility

When Atul commented about open source being “seen as some kind of ‘hobbyist’ thing” in India, I was reminded of another incident in college. In 6th semester of VTU B.E., we had a DBMS (Database Management Systems) lab. We were supposed to write some software that demonstrates database design,

India

Memories of Linux Bangalore 2003

The VTU letter exhorting principals to motivate students to attend foss.in is a far cry from my college days, and perhaps even farther from Kalyan’s days. I remember asking our department’s Assistant HOD (I don’t remember his exact designation) whether our semester laboratory internals tests could