My publisher recently unveiled the fourth edition of Python Object-oriented Programming. This one has a new twist: I didn’t write it!
When I first encountered the Internet my peers and I thought it was great fun to share our dev setups. We were always optimizing and always looking for new ways to optimize. Not to mention showing off.
I lost interest in this practice because I settled into a system that was sufficient for my needs. Also, I didn’t have time!
But I’ve recently made a ton of changes to my workflow that some might be interested in, and I happen to have some time as I’m between jobs. So I thought it might be a good time to share!
I am trying a new blogging format hoping that I can post interesting content more often. Looking for feedback on the format.
I’ve been wondering what to do with this blog for a while. I haven’t had time to do the technical deep dives I used to do. But I’ve also been reluctant to pivot into different kinds of articles. I’ll write more about that in the future (the summary is that I’ve been writing fiction instead of code in my free time). For now, however, I’ve decided to publish a non-technical shallow dive on something I do not understand very well: stock markets and economics.
I’m about halfway into writing my first novel. Though I have plenty of writing experience, this is my first real attempt at fiction. I’ve been surprised at the difficulty! Some of my skills transfer over; I still know the basic structure of the English language and I put commas in the right places more often than not, for example. But many other things are much different.
The hardest change I’ve had to make is the order I present information. In a nonfiction book, I try to present everything in a logical order with as much clarity as possible. Each step should lead to the next step in a way that is comfortable and non-intimidating to the reader.
Python 3 Object-oriented Programming 3rd Edition
My publisher unveiled the third edition of Python 3 Object-oriented Programming today! This has been the culmination of several months of work.
Editing and updating the second edition was a pleasure. It was gratifying to discover that the content has aged well. This was not the case with the first edition; I did extensive restructuring and rewriting before I was satisfied with the second.
I accidentally started working on a new personal project for budgeting that I think others might be interested in. I haven’t open sourced any projects in quite a few years now, but if I actually finish an iteration of this project, I think I’ll probably share it under an open licence.
While I’ll be running the service locally, it is implemented entirely in Javascript React, and could easily be deployed as a SAAS. I was considering sharing it as a hosted service and charging a small fee for it, a little to cover the hosting costs and a little extra for my time. I’m not interested in growing or maintaining a startup, but it would be worthwhile if I could get a couple hundred users each spending a couple bucks a month to support a project they find useful.
Hi there, I’m Dusty. Welcome to my resurrected blog.
I started a tech blog in 2007 that I maintained with regular posts for several years. While it was well-regarded at the time, I took it down in late 2016 for several reasons. First and most obviously, I became extremely busy, and simply did not have time to keep up the schedule and quality of my writing. That reduced availability coincided with my taking on a new role with Facebook in late 2013. Working on infrastructure at Facebook scale requires understanding problems and technologies that are only interesting to the largest dozen or so tech companies in the world, and many of them are proprietary. As a result, I ran out of blog topics that would be of interest to the general population. Third, the blog was throwing frequent database errors and I didn’t have the time or interest to maintain it. I figured my audience would mostly have abandoned it by that point due to infrequent posting and intermittent availability.
