Computer Vision in Three Lines of Code plus a bunch more lines

August 15, 2018 in Python

My wife and I both have a tendency to leave the garage door open. You’re in and out, grabbing garden tools or supplies, and at the end of the day you enter the house through the back door and forget to check the garage. Luckily, we live in rural Canada, surrounded by wonderful people, where the door could sit open for days without anything “disappearing”. But it still makes me feel nervous to discover it’s been forgotten, if only because it is a waste of heat in the winter (not to mention the chance of blowing full of snow!

Python: Loading pathlib Paths with argparse

August 13, 2018 in Python

I really appreciate Python’s pathlib module for managing filesystem stuff. While I don’t love the argparse module for command line parsing, I don’t think it’s worse than other available options. I usually choose it for my CLI scripts, since nothing else is good enough to overcome the inertia of using a third party library. Not many people seem to be aware that the two can very easily be combined such that argparse will return Path objects instead of strings that need to be adapted after you query them:

An Order to Learn to Program, Part 2

August 10, 2018 in Learning

Parts in this series An Order to Learn to Program, Part 1 An Order to Learn to Program, Part 2 An Order to Learn to Program, Part 3 An Order to Learn to Program, Part 4 An Order to Learn to Program, Part 5 An Order to Learn to Program, Part 6 Part 2: HTML This is the second in a series on the order to study topics related to programming.

Refund for Contribution?

August 5, 2018 in General

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.

An Order to Learn to Program, Part 1

July 31, 2018 in Learning

Parts in this series An Order to Learn to Program, Part 1 An Order to Learn to Program, Part 2 An Order to Learn to Program, Part 3 An Order to Learn to Program, Part 4 An Order to Learn to Program, Part 5 An Order to Learn to Program, Part 6 Part 1 Learning to program is hard. There are a few reasons this is the case:

Hacking Happier

July 26, 2018 in Mental Health

Back in 2012, I wrote a book called Hacking Happy. It was my first self-published work, and I was actually surprised by how well it did without a publisher or marketing behind it. I had plenty of positive feedback including more than one hopefully exaggerated, “This book saved my life.” Most of the feedback was a bit more sedate, but I received a lot of private messages thanking me for writing it.

I'm Back

July 25, 2018 in General

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.

Computer Vision in Three Lines of Code plus a bunch more lines

Python: Loading pathlib Paths with argparse

An Order to Learn to Program, Part 2

Refund for Contribution?

An Order to Learn to Program, Part 1

Hacking Happier

I'm Back

Dusty Phillips