There was something about this image that reminded me of older snapshots. I think it’s the fact that it’s a candid moment, not perfectly sharp as Scarlett moved out of the focal plane; but it’s not out of focus - you can see that from the shirts. So when I was processing the shot, I went for an older look. I think I ended up applying a Kodachrome effect.

Scarlett (March 2020)

a post-race selfie

Ever since fall 2019, I’ve been training for the Cherry Blossom 10 mile race, scheduled for 5 April 2020. Unfortunately, like everything else involving more than one person, it’s been scuttled by COVID-19. After all that training, it was disappointing. (I will take a moment to acknowledge that it’s objectively ridiculous to be disappointed by a missed race when people are dying. However, there’s always someone worse off than any other person. eg. I can feel that I’ve had a bad day at work, even if my day wasn’t as bad as someone who found out they had cancer It doesn’t delegitimize their feelings of disappointment as long as they keep it in perspective.) The organizers of the Cherry Blossom Festival race had a solution - a virtual race! Run wherever you can and record your time and it’ll all go on the website. It’s not perfect, but it’s certainly a way to use all that training you’ve done. So today I went ahead and did the race since the weather’s actually good today. It was an AWESOME run. It felt great to do it and, given the insane hills in my neighborhood, I finished feeling that I could definitely kick butt in the Cherry Blossom race next year because their course is not very hilly. It also renewed my confidence in being able to do well in the Baltimore 10-miler this summer (if it’s not cancelled), renowned for being hilly. So how did I do? (if you paid attention, it was spoiled at the top…hehe)

11 years ago (HOLY MOLEY WHERE DOES THE TIME GO?!?) I wrote about Jeffrey Friedl’s LR Stats plugin. As you know if you’ve been around my blog for a while, I love stats! It’s the biggest reason I do my end of year posts with my music, reading, and video game stats. Well, I haven’t used Lightroom for a few years now, and for some reason I was inspired this past weekend to recreate this ability. So I started on photostats, which will present a lot of the same stats that his Lightroom plugin does. On the plus side, my Python program is app-agnostic!

I’ve been using PyCharm for about a week now across a couple projects. I’d like to note a few things I’m really enjoying:

• PyCharm is aware of your venv config and you can use it to pip install new packages. Ok, so pip is easy to use for installing. But it also provides a quick at-a-glance view of the packages you’ve installed and their versions - and I find it easier to view than a pip freeze.
• I know KDevelop has this for C++, but it doesn’t really have the same support for Python - being able to run my Python files from within PyCharm as well as being able to run the debugger from within PyCharm is like how new cars unlock for you when you get close. It’s not necessary. It’s not even that huge of an improvement. But it’s a quality of life thing that you miss when it’s not there.
• PyCharm is very smart about git. With KDevelop, I could add files withink the GUI (which is nice for making sure the project is aware of the file and provides a quick visual cue). But then I had to remember to git add it (either in the GUI or on the commandline). With PyCharm, every time I add a file through the GUI, it asks me if I want to add it to version control.

PyCharm asking if I want to add the new file to source control

If you’ve been following my blog for a long time, you know that back in 2014 I was working on a Python program to create hourly btrfs snapshots and cull them according to a certain algorithm. (See all the related posts here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) The furthest I ever got was weekly culling. Frankly, life and school contributed a good excuse not to keep going because I had created a huge headache for myself by attempting to figure out the date and cover all the possible corner cases with unit tests. This is what my code looked like in 2014.

I decided to document the tools I’m using for development since the various programming subreddits I frequent always have someone asking what tools they should be using.

IDEs/Editors

Linux

As I wrote in September, I’ve moved to using KDevelop for my larger projects.

KDevelop

Its built-in Python parser (working with flake8) has helped me find a lot of issues before getting to the stage of running flake8. The GUI for pushing commits to git has been very helpful in helping remind me what has changed and even (sometimes) noticing something I forgot to add to git. Its project-wide search has been invaluable when refactoring or renaming functions/classes. When it comes to large, complex programs, it’s hard to beat KDevelop when using KDE. That said, it’s only recently that the developers have started focusing away from being only a C++ editor and as you’ll see at the end of this blog post, for my Python workflow, I might be switching away.

• 1 Hour Pizza
• Quesadilla

Very low number of new dishes. Mostly because I was obsessed with programming and Gwent.

Both recipes were from America’s Test Kitchen. The pizza recipe was a challenge to be able to make a pizza that would be ready in an hour and not suffer too much from not having the pizza ferment for a few days. I thought it was alright. Despite liberally dusting the pizza peel, had a hard time getting the pizza off.

Back in September I wrote about moving to KDevelop for my larger Python projects and also staying with Kate for my smaller projects. I’ve REALLY been enjoying all the features as I work on more and more complex packages involving lots of files. But for a few episodes of Python Bytes now (and/or maybe Talk Python to Me - they share a host) they’ve been talking about how awesome it is to use an IDE that has a Python debugger built in. It may be that KDevelop has that ability (I’m pretty sure it does for C++), but I’m not sure. I am nearly certain that Pycharm does have a debugger built-in. A while ago I’d set up the Pycharm COPR repo on my laptop. I tried playing with it a little at the time, but I was coding on a very small project without a venv, so things didn’t work out well. (Pycharm is pretty opinionated about the way a Python project should work)