Reading EBNF

In early October I gave a keynote at Python Brasil in Belo Horizonte. Here is an aspirational and lightly edited transcript of the talk. There is also a video available here. I love bugs I’m currently a senior engineer at Pilot.com, working on automating bookkeeping for startups. Before that, I worked for Dropbox on the desktop client team, and...

I often hear junior engineers or newcomers to a company say that they’re not getting enough feedback. It’s a common feeling, especially for people who are just leaving school and the predictable assignment->work->grade feedback loop that it creates. There’s lots of good advice for managers, mentors, and senior engineers about giving specific,...

My 2015 was a year of recovering from a serious injury and becoming a better engineer. I also gave four talks and published a chapter I’ve been working on for a while. I’m hopeful that 2016 will bring as many opportunities for growth and fewer broken bones. TPF I broke my knee – a tibial plateau fracture – at the beginning of February, 2015. It...

In early September I gave a keynote at Kiwi PyCon in New Zealand on effective learning for programmers. There were two pieces to the talk: one about mindset, and one about particular strategies we can use. The text below is an aspirational and lightly edited transcript of the mindset piece of that talk. There’s also a video available if you’d...

I spend a lot of time flipping back and forth between Python 2.x and 3.x: I use different versions for different projects, talk to people about different versions, explore differences between the two, and paste the output of REPL sessions into chat windows. I also like to keep long-running REPL sessions. These two activities in combination...