Month: April 2017

Code Iterations – A Mentoring Example

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One of the pleasures in life is mentoring another developer, particularly when the other developer is smart and motivated to learn.  This article, on populating a tree from a collection of paths, was the result of some weekend prep work and is a good case study on refactoring.  By going through the process myself and documenting it, I was able to present the problem in general terms, and the person I was mentoring did the heavy mental lifting with only occasional guidance on my part.  This worked because I was prepared — had I not done this prep work, I would have taken away from my mentee’s experience to  actually solving the problem himself.

Article here.

Two Articles Win First Prize for March

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Well, that was a “first!” — Two articles:

Understanding Merkle Trees

Full Duplex Asynchronous Read/Write with Named Piped

have won first place in Code Project‘s monthly article competition in the categories of “Best Everything Else” and “Best C# Article” for the month of March 2017.

And as always, with great appreciation to the amazing people @codeproject who have made Code Project possible!

 

Who was Born on Your Birthday?

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Six lines (not including imports) of Python code to scrape the website onthisday.com for the “persons of interest.”  Impressive!

Package dependencies:

pip install lxml
pip install cssselect
pip install requests

The Python code:

import requests
from lxml import html
from lxml.cssselect import CSSSelector
from lxml import etree
 
page = requests.get("http://www.onthisday.com/birthdays/august/19")
tree = html.fromstring(page.content)
sel = CSSSelector('.section--person-of-interest')
pois = sel(tree)
 
for poi in pois:
 poi.xpath("div/div/div[1]/p")[0].text_content()

The results (for my birthday):

'1871 Orville Wright, aviator (Wright Brothers), born in Dayton, Ohio (d. 1912)'
'1878 Manuel Luis Quezon y Molina, Second President of the Philippines (1935-42), born in Baler, Aurora, Philippines (d. 1944)'
'1919 Malcolm Forbes, American publisher of Forbes Magazine, born in Brooklyn, New York (d. 1990)'
'1946 Bill Clinton [William Jefferson], 42nd US President (Democrat, 1993-2001), born in Hope, Arkansas'
'1967 Satya Nadella, Indian-American businessman (CEO of Microsoft), born in Hyderabad'