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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

The Tech Deck

Tabs for the week

Last week's tabs development heavy, since it's been crunch time here for a few projects. I'm also posting them late, for the same reasons. Anyway, check 'em out:

Celery is a Python script we use here at the Spokesman to perform various tasks in the background. I haven't needed to mess with it before, but last week I wrote an auto tweet app that will post the finals game scores for our high school sports site, and I wanted it to not block the __save() method on our games model, so that's an ideal use for a Celery task. Long story short, we're using a slightly older version of Celery and we don't have the greatest internal documentation on our setup so I had to do some Googling. Got it to work though, so if you follow @nwprepsnow on Twitter, you'll see game scores as soon as someone hits "done" on a game.

Two presentations on how to develop code like a Python developer and not a Java developer. Jack Diederich's presentation at PyCon 2012 is inspiring to me as a programmer because he boils down some fundamental philosophies in Python that really resonate with me: ship less code, use less classes, don't write your own exceptions. Raymond Hettinger's presentation (also a link to his slides) is fantastic in that it shows you tricks and stdlib tools to not only make your code more beautiful, but also easier to read and more performant. Both are absolutely essential, IMO.

I have this idea about using the/a bitcoin blockchain as a distributed, censorship free bookmarking service that could be used to not only sync your bookmarks across browsers, but also to create a global directory of all the links. ALL the links. Turns out, the Bitcoin protocol is... above my pay grade? Yeah, I'm just going to go with that. It's deep, difficult crypto/maths stuff that, although certainly interesting and important, is really hard to fully grasp.

I honestly don't know how I get on some of these pages, but if you wanted to purchase a manly gift for someone, any one of these would be super rad. Hint hint. Not so subtle hint, someone buy me these things.

That's it for last week, stay tuned for more!



Daniel Gayle
Dan Gayle joined The Spokesman-Review in 2013. He is currently a Python/Django developer in the newsroom, primarily responsible for front end development and design of spokesman.com.

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