Getting ready for my first trip to Hyderabad!

Health

Been working on dragon flags and handstand pushups at the gym. Only 3 biking days this week :(. On the other hand, they were all good days. It’s cold enough now to break out the gloves here in NYC, so I’m looking forward to warmer days in Hyd for the next few weeks. I wonder if I can rent a bike there easily?

Family

One of the reasons for that: I got to take Max Lazer to go see Tinga Tinga. He got to see it, I just got to be part of the parental escort through the subways to Times Square. He handled it great, but it was amazing to see the way the teachers handle 22 kindergartners getting through the subway system.

Z is teething and it’s so tough on her. I hope it ends soon. On the other hand, I managed to get both kids to sleep in the same room at the same time on Wednesday and Thursday we got Z to sleep the whole night through!

My Kobo broke and I sent it off to be replaced, but I must have an e-reader for the trip so I am now the owner of a Kindle Paperwhite as well. As someone who’s now owned and used a Nook, Kobo and Kindle, I’ll write up my take on it. Should have some time on the 16 hours or so of flight time!

Code

Been helping folks at work learn some more advanced Python. I get excited every time I talk about list or dictionary comprehensions because they were a real light when I was learning python in the beginning.

You often need to transform data structures and the first way is usually to just iterate a list, construct new instances of something else, then pop them into a list of new things.

Say you have a list of cool coders you want to talk about.

from collections import namedtuple
Coder = namedtuple('Person', 'name login url')
cool_coders = [Coder(name="Grace Hopper", login="ghopper", url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper"),
Coder(name="Ada Lovelace", login="ladyada", url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace"),
Coder(name="Jenn Schiffer", login="jennmoney", url="https://jennmoney.biz/"),
Coder(name="Nina Zharenko", login="nnja", url="https://www.nnja.io/"),
]

intro = "Here's a list of some cool coders and more you can learn about them: "

Maybe you want to produce a markdown sentence listing them.

coder_markup = []
for programmer in cool_coders:
    coder_markup.append( "[{}]({})".format(programmer.name, programmer.url) )
markup = intro + ", ".join(coder_markup)

Sure, that could be more complicated and have more changes or filtering that needs to be done. But what’s nice about a comprehension is that it helps cut down boilerplate and it makes things clearer.

coder_markup2 = ["[{}]({})".format(coder.name, coder.url) for coder in cool_coders]
markup = intro + ", ".join(coder_markup2)

And of course, if we were on python 3.6 we could make that even smaller by just using fstrings.

I’ve been using tmux pretty heavily, but now I get annoyed that on reboot I have to rebuild all of my workspaces. So now I’ve installed tmuxinator. It should be useful for setting up project/workspaces and then firing them up after a reboot.

Of course – I don’t just install tmuxinator. I set it so that it can auto-install on any account I’ve got with my jumpstart script.  If you know any cool tricks or experiences you want to share about either, I’m eager to learn.