Duct tape considered harmful

Blogs are a useful and important tool for professional developers and engineers, for two main reasons. Firstly, by and large, we are not free to divulge the details of the work we do while under contract — but at our next interview, those details are precisely what the interview itself is there to judge. So blogs (and I include this one without question) can take on a professional portfolio role, showcasing examples of professional work as applied to side projects, giving professional opinions on relevant products and work practices and so forth, all of which informs an interviewer who does their research as to the suitability of a candidate for a position. This is an old technique that artists and graphic designers are explicitly familiar with.

Relevant professional blogs can also act as a cheap way to monitor your continuing professional development. They’re not training courses, they’re not accredited and they never will be; but observing what your peers are doing is a very old way of watching for trends that you might consider directing your own CPD efforts towards. Through RSS feeds, RSS aggregator sites and a decent RSS reader, it is relatively easy to monitor large numbers of blogs with little effort beyond the actual reading of new articles as they appear.

The problem is that some bloggers, so focussed on the first goal of presenting a good online portfolio, and so obsessed with metrics like pages-served-per-week as a measure of progress towards that first goal, post dross which can then impede others in the pursuit of the second goal because of the lack (and impossibility) of an effective peer review process. In some cases, bloggers seem to abandon completely the goal in pursuit of the metric – chasing after eyeballs without having anything of substance to then display to this newly captured audience.

Kada2.py output

Ray asked to see what the output of the kada2 script I’ve been working on looks like – only problem is that I’ve been using a real datafile for development, so it has people’s names in it. To avoid any shoutyness, one quick python script to read in the members.kda file and write it back out to test.kda with all the names changed to John Smith; then a quick run with this file as the members.kda file and some imagemagick conversions and viola, the current kada.py output.

ReportLab

As I mentioned before, after writing a python script to read in Kada’s data files on the rifle club shooters’ scores and calculate new ladders, the next step is output that’s a bit fancier than the straight ASCII text dump:

Novice Air Ladder
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

 1         Joe D'Plumber    45  91.833    94
 2         Joe D'Plumber    36  87.500    91
 3         Joe D'Plumber    18  87.167    92
 4         Joe D'Plumber    16  85.833    91
 5         Joe D'Plumber    26  85.167    92
 6         Joe D'Plumber    31  81.167    87
          Tito D'Builder     2  76.000    76  *
 7         Joe D'Plumber     7  74.000    82
          Tito D'Builder     2  69.000    75  *
          Tito D'Builder     2  67.000    68  *
          Tito D'Builder     2  66.000    70  *
          Tito D'Builder     1  64.000    64  *
 8         Joe D'Plumber    10  63.167    78
          Tito D'Builder     1  62.000    62  *
 9         Joe D'Plumber     4  61.750    76
          Tito D'Builder     2  61.500    72  *
          Tito D'Builder     1  60.000    60  *
          Tito D'Builder     2  55.500    71  *
          Tito D'Builder     2  55.000    58  *
10         Joe D'Plumber     3  53.667    62
          Tito D'Builder     1  52.000    52  *
          Tito D'Builder     1  50.000    50  *
          Tito D'Builder     1  49.000    49  *

This does the basic job that the original system did (actually, it does a bit more – the asterisks mark out those shooters who haven’t yet shot enough cards to get on the ladder, but they’re still listed as an incentive for them to shoot more cards – the current system doesn’t do this). It’s not really doing all that can be done, however, and it’s certainly not all that fancy-looking. Especially in a scripting language, where the whole point is to do fancy stuff quickly through toolkits. So, what I wanted was PDF output (because these are printed off and posted up in the club), graphics like logos and so on, but also some graphs and charts with some meaningful data.

One of the graphs I wanted to include was one of Edward Tufte’s many good ideas, sparklines. Small graphs which summarise the state of play of a variable in an easy to read, inline format (meaning that it’s in the flow of the text itself as if english had suddenly become a pictographic language for a moment. They seemed perfect to show a high-level view of how the shooters were doing over the course of the year. Also, it would be nice to display the various breakdowns and analysis of membership (by gender, experience, college year, etc) in a graphical form – there’s nothing wrong with the raw data, but it’s almost always easier and faster to take in analysis that has a graphical expression. So pie charts and such would be an improvement.

Python

One of the downsides of working on a pre-startup project is that you really can’t say much about it. Seriously. You think Cryptonomicon seemed paranoid about security? You’ve just never met the folks who safeguard possible IP for college spin-outs. Yowza. And it’s a shame because some of this stuff is really rather nifty, and it’s been good to not only do some high-level design of low-level stuff, but also to get back to implementing in C and for high-capacity stuff as well.

However, side projects are totally fair game

At the moment, most of my side-project time has gone into a quick script for the rifle club in college. It has to read in a text file and do some basic statistics on the data therein. PHP would blaze through this in a web setting, but to my mind, PHP is out of its depth when not running on a webserver so I thought something else would be more appropriate. Perl is certainly up to the task, as is Ruby and I’ve been wanting to learn Ruby for a while, but some upcoming PhD stuff requires me to know Python, so I figured this would be a good starting point for it, so apt-get install python and away I went.