Category: Programming

London Python Meetup January 2019 – Async Python and GeoPandas

It was a pleasure to go to the London Python Meetup organised by @python_london. There were plenty of friendly people and interesting conversations.

I gave a talk “Making 100 million requests with Python aiohttp” (slides, Blog post) explaining the basics of writing async code in Python 3 and how I used that to make a very large number of HTTP requests.

Andy giving the presentation

(Photo by CB Bailey.)

Hopefully it was helpful – there were several good questions, so I am optimistic that people were engaged with it.

After that, there was an excellent talk by Gareth Lloyd called “GeoPandas, the geospatial extension for Pandas” in which he explained how to use the very well-developed geo-spatial data tools available in the Python ecosphere to transform, combine, plot and analyse data which includes location information. I was really impressed with how easy the libraries looked to use, and also with the cool Jupyter notebook Gareth used to explain the ideas using live demos.

London Python Meetups seem like a cool place to meet Pythonistas of all levels of experience in a nice, low-pressure environment!

Meetup link: aiohttp / GeoPandas

Code Like a Girl T-shirts

There are lots of people missing from the programming world: lots of the programmers I meet look and sound a lot like me. I’d really like it if this amazing job were open to a lot more people.

One of the weird things that has happened is that somehow we seem to have the idea that programming is only for boys, and I’d like to fight against that idea by wearing a t-shirt demonstrating how cool I think it is to be a woman coder.

So, I commissioned a design from an amazing artist called Ellie Mars, who I found through her Mastodon.art page @elliemars@mastodon.art. She did an amazing job, sending sketches and ideas back and forth, and finally she came up with this awesome design:

I’ve printed a t-shirt for myself that I will give myself for Christmas, and I’ve made a page on Street Shirts so you can get one too!

The link goes to an adult men’s t-shirt, but after you click the link you can choose the t-shirt type (including women’s and children’s) and change the background colour.  They are reasonably cheap:

If you have any questions, you are welcome to contact me (via DM or publicly) on twitter @andybalaam or Mastodon @andybalaam@mastodon.social, or by email, via a short test.

Ellie and I agreed to set up these t-shirts sales with no profit for us because we’d like to get the word out.  If they are popular we might add a little, so get in fast for a good deal!

10 points for anyone who can recognise the code in the background.  It’s from one of my favourite programs.

Personally, I think we all spend too much of our time walking around advertising faceless corporations when we could be saying something a bit more useful on our clothes.  What do you think of this idea?  Maybe you could design a similar t-shirt?  Let me know your thoughts in the comments below or on Twitter or Mastodon.

Elm makes me happy (updated for Elm 0.19) video

Series: Snake in Elm, Elm makes me happy, Elm Basics, Elm Unit Test, Elm JSON

With up-to-date examples, and anecdotes from the last couple of years of continuing to enjoy writing web pages in Elm, here’s a new version of my Elm advert:

Slides: Elm makes me happy slides.

Godot: make new objects at runtime (instancing) video

Series: 2D Shapes, drag and drop, new objects

My Godot 3 game is progressing, and I am starting to think I am actually writing the level editor. Here’s how I wrote code to make new versions of existing objects (by converting them to scenes):

Godot version: v3.0.6.stable.official.8314054