Articles on software engineering, writing code, building products.

Useful bash and zsh aliases

Useful bash and zsh aliases

A handful of useful command line snippets for Bash and ZSH.
13 Jun 2021 - 3 min read
Resetting Algolia's vue-instantsearch when clicking a result

Resetting Algolia's vue-instantsearch when clicking a result

Fiddling with Algolia's vue-instantsearch component to reset the search input when selecting a result.
10 Mar 2021 - 3 min read
Encoding / Decoding JSON objects in Python

Encoding / Decoding JSON objects in Python

A summary of how to serialize and deserialize from Python data structures into JSON-compatible strings, which is especially useful when working with API requests and responses.
12 Mar 2019 - 3 min read
Bit Manipulation Part 2 - Bitwise operators in Python

Bit Manipulation Part 2 - Bitwise operators in Python

A primer on bitwise operators in Python - left and right shifting, bitwise and / or / exclusive or, and complements.
18 Jan 2019 - 3 min read
Bit Manipulation Part 1 - Understanding binary numbers

Bit Manipulation Part 1 - Understanding binary numbers

An easy introduction to binary numbers, which will lead to a follow-up article on bit manipulation in Python.
13 Nov 2018 - 4 min read
Primer to Python multiprocessing, multithreading, and asyncio

Primer to Python multiprocessing, multithreading, and asyncio

Basic overview of parallel / concurrent programming, including comparisons between multiprocessing, multithreading, and asyncio (coroutines) in Python.
24 Oct 2018 - 6 min read
Introduction to Client-Side Javascript in 2018

Introduction to Client-Side Javascript in 2018

My notes for introducing a junior engineer to client-side Javascript for the first time, touching briefly on vanilla JS, jQuery, and VueJS.
30 Sept 2018 - 7 min read
Jumbo list of most common datetime / timestamp functions in Redshift and MySQL

Jumbo list of most common datetime / timestamp functions in Redshift and MySQL

A list of common expressions for working with date, time, datetime, and timestamp columns in MySQL 5.7.x and Redshift.
8 Sept 2018 - 4 min read
Method delegation in Python

Method delegation in Python

Using Python, a short example on how to delegate specified methods to another object, as compared to composition and inheritance.
11 Jul 2018 - 5 min read
Using Python enums in SQLAlchemy models

Using Python enums in SQLAlchemy models

How to use enums in your models to enforce value consistency.
16 May 2018 - 3 min read
Python command-line scripts with argparse

Python command-line scripts with argparse

A template file for using conditional arguments when running Python scripts from the command line.
15 Feb 2018 - 3 min read
SQLAlchemy commit(), flush(), expire(), refresh(), merge() - what's the difference?

SQLAlchemy commit(), flush(), expire(), refresh(), merge() - what's the difference?

I've always struggled to remember between these very similar methods in the SQLALchemy ORM - so I took some time out to research these and write it down.
2 Nov 2017 - 7 min read