Braindump - week 02/02/2015

The Weekly Programming Braindump

• Sebastian Rashka has written an interesting post on parallel programming with Python

• When you are designing a Python method (aka function) that involves file IO, is it “better” (in whatever way a programmer may choose to define better) to pass the file as a filename (string) to the method and let the method take care of opening the file or is better to pass it as a file object and do the whole opening conundrum in the client calling the method/function

• I started learning about tuple spaces and tuple space programming

• I learned something about blocking and non-blocking IO in Java, but I can’t say I could explain it to someone else. Must do more research.

• I started using PyCharm and downloaded Spyder. The weekend should be called “Fun with IDEs”

• I am planning to write a Spyder plugin for bioinformaticians. That is, as soon as I learn how to use Spyder

• I started learning about limit order books in finance and started writing my own limit order book simulation based on the orderbook package in R

• I just completed the data harvesting phase for my London Tube Simulation and I could not be more excited about it!

• I was inspired by KDB+ and Q (I can’t say I have any experience of either really, I just happened to browse the Wikis for fun) to mangle together a pseudo-useful data structure for my next project.

• I learned about ctags in Vim (but not, like, how you actually make them useful for your project)

• I learned something about transcompilers and to be honest, they scare me a bit (Compilers scare me too, but in a good way!)

• I started reading Ilmari Karonen’s introduction to Redcode again and this time it started making more sense.

• I have been thinking about the Global Interpreter Lock in Python and how one may try to circumnavigate it and what would the consequences of that be (!!!!)

• TDD has been starting to stick on me. Esp. after I started using Pycharm. It’s just so addicting to see that green “play” button, click on it and get the satisfying “Tests passed”. Ahhh.

• I found a paper about computing confidence intervals of the AUC. Previously, Python completely zonked on me, when I tried to implement one of the formulas from the paper, but I think I may give it another try this weekend (armed with numpy and scipy).

• I finally learned the difference between .bashrc and .bash_profile (yeah, I’m slow…but hey, better late than never!)