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)

It was time to take some portrait shots of Scarlett. As I was getting set up, I decided that I wanted to try something new; something I’d struggled with before, but never been able to succeed at - a flash highlight of a black background. I’d seen Gavin Hooey use the technique to great success on his Adorama TV show on Youtube. But somehow I’d just never been able to get it to work well. So I decided to try and mess around with the setup before the photo shoot. Eventually, I found something that worked well for me. I think, reviewing the photos for the fifth time now, that as I have it set up, it works best for the closeup shots. For the 3/4 shots, it probably should have been either dropped a little lower or maybe pulled away from the background a bit more to spread it out a bit more. The setup looked like this:

It’s been 5 months since I last wrote about ELDonation Tracker, my software for tracking Extra Life donations for use during a livestream or VOD. I’ve been quite busy since then! First, I used Github pages to make a site for the software to make it a little easier for those who are just users and don’t intend to do any development. They don’t have to navigate Github to try and figure out how to get the program and use it. Then, by reading Serious Python I learned about Sphinx, which can automatically create documentation out of your docstrings. I also learned that all these “readthedocs” pages I’d seen springing up with all the projects I care about were leveraging the fact that readthedocs.io will use your Sphinx documentation to create hosted documentation. So now I have some great documentation for my software. Finally, it’s my SECOND bit of software to go up on PyPi:

I’ve both added and dropped some podcasts since last time around. Where I’m listing the same podcast as last year I may use the same description as in the past with slight (or no) variation.

Public Radio

Radiolab – Heard about them because sometimes their stories are used on This American Life. Radiolab is a lot like TAL except with a much bigger focus on sound effects. It is, in a way, the descendant of the old radio shows of the 30s and 40s. (Approx 30-45 min)

Soleil by Jacqueline Garlick

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

It is a real bummer for me to give this book 1 star. I really enjoyed the first book in the trilogy. The second book was fun. But this book… kind of just felt like perhaps this series should have been a duology instead of a trilogy. While the first third or so was a good bit of fan service, it could have maybe just been a post-script novella? The rest of the book was just full of the introduction of all sorts of new rules and technology to the way the world worked that I didn’t think made sense in the third book of a trilogy. On top of that, the last chunk - from when our main characters end up in a canyon until the end just didn’t make any god forsaken sense. (view spoiler)[Who rebuilt the dead people? I kept thinking it was all going to end up being a dream or parallel universe or something (hide spoiler)]

Serious Python: Black-Belt Advice on Deployment, Scalability, Testing, and More by Julien Danjou

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is an AWESOME book that has completely transformed the way I code in Python. That might sound like the opening to a parody review, but I’m being sincere. One of the best things about Python is that it has a low barrier to entry and it’s easy to get started programming. One of the worst things about Python is that it has a low barrier to entry and it’s easy to get started programming. I’ve been going through the past 15ish years with just a surface-level understanding of my favorite programming language.

Over the Wine-Dark Sea by H.N. Turteltaub

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the second time I’ve read this book, the first time being nearly 20 years ago when it first came out. A few key bits had stuck with me, like Menedemos’ womanizing and a battle at sea. But after 20 years, most of the details had faded, so it was almost like reading it anew.

Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 134 by Neil Clarke

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I wasn’t quite into this one as much as some other recent issues. Here are my reviews per story:

Prasetyo Plastics - Less of a traditional story and more of a meditation on unbridled capitalism that does not descend into a libertarian dystopia. Rather, it’s another that asks if we truly realize what we’re doing to this planet on a scale that we believe has never been attempted before.