Michael Warkentin mwarkentin

Comprehensions in Python the Jedi way

Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit.

I frequently deal with collections of things in the programs I write. Collections of droids, jedis, planets, lightsabers, starfighters, etc. When programming in Python, these collections of things are usually represented as lists, sets and dictionaries. Oftentimes, what I want to do with collections is to transform them in various ways. Comprehensions is a powerful syntax for doing just that. I use them extensively, and it's one of the things that keep me coming back to Python. Let me show you a few examples of the incredible usefulness of comprehensions.

If you use Amazon AWS for nearly anything, then you are probably familiar with KMS, the Amazon Key Management Service.

KMS is a service which allows API-level access to cryptographic primitives without the expense and complexity of a full-fledged HSM or CloudHSM implementation. There are trade-offs in that the key material does reside on servers rather than tamper-proof devices, but these risks should be acceptable to a wide range of customers based on the care Amazon has put into the product. You should perform your own diligence on whether KMS is appropriate for your environment. If the security profile is not adequate, you should consider a stronger product such as CloudHSM or managing your own HSM solutions.

The goal here is to provide some introductory code on how to perform envelope encrypt a message using the AWS KMS API.

KMS allows you to encrypt messages of up to 4kb in size directly using the encrypt()/decrypt() API. To exceed these limitations, you must use a technique called "envelope encryptio

When you cancel a Jenkins job

Unfinished draft; do not use until this notice is removed.

We were seeing some unexpected behavior in the processes that Jenkins launches when the Jenkins user clicks "cancel" on their job. Unexpected behaviors like:

apparently stale lockfiles and pidfiles
overlapping processes
jobs apparently ending without performing cleanup tasks
jobs continuing to run after being reported "aborted"

2015-01-29 Unofficial Relay FAQ

Compilation of questions and answers about Relay from React.js Conf.

Disclaimer: I work on Relay at Facebook. Relay is a complex system on which we're iterating aggressively. I'll do my best here to provide accurate, useful answers, but the details are subject to change. I may also be wrong. Feedback and additional questions are welcome.

What is Relay?

Relay is a new framework from Facebook that provides data-fetching functionality for React applications. It was announced at React.js Conf (January 2015).

The introduction to Reactive Programming you've been missing

(by @andrestaltz)

This tutorial as a series of videos

If you prefer to watch video tutorials with live-coding, then check out this series I recorded with the same contents as in this article: Egghead.io - Introduction to Reactive Programming.

A lot of these are outright stolen from Edward O'Campo-Gooding's list of questions. I really like his list.

I'm having some trouble paring this down to a manageable list of questions -- I realistically want to know all of these things before starting to work at a company, but it's a lot to ask all at once. My current game plan is to pick 6 before an interview and ask those.

I'd love comments and suggestions about any of these.

I've found questions like "do you have smart people? Can I learn a lot at your company?" to be basically totally useless -- everybody will say "yeah, definitely!" and it's hard to learn anything from them. So I'm trying to make all of these questions pretty concrete -- if a team doesn't have an issue tracker, they don't have an issue tracker.

I'm also mostly not asking about principles, but the way things are -- not "do you think code review is important?", but "Does all code get reviewed?".

	...

	action_with_slack_notification = %(banaction)s[name=%(__name__)s, port="%(port)$
	slack[name=%(__name__)s]

	action = %(action_with_slack_notification)s

	...

	#!/usr/bin/env -e bash
	# bootstrap statflo dev - curl -sSL http://j.mp/statflodev \| bash
	ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
	brew install caskroom/cask/brew-cask
	brew cask install dockertoolbox the-silver-searcher
	docker-machine create dev
	eval "$(docker-machine env dev)"
	mkdir -p ~/statflo
	git clone https://github.com/Statflo/statflo-webapp.git ~/statflo/
	curl -Ls https://install.convox.com/osx.zip > /tmp/convox.zip

	package main

	import (
	"flag"
	"fmt"
	"strings"
	)

	const DB_REDSHIFT = "redshift"
	const DB_POSTGRES = "postgres"

	import random
	import requests
	from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

	if __name__ == "__main__":
	r = requests.get("http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Price_Is_Right_pricing_games")
	soup = BeautifulSoup(r.content)
	games = soup.find_all("span", {"class":"mw-headline"})
	while True:
	choice = random.choice(games).text