Python is great for a number of things. It powers 1.4% of the internet, Nasa uses it a lot! and you can use it to create art. In honour of Star Wars Day, I wanted to create a program that dynamically generated lightsabers and tweeted them out once a day. TL;DR I created a computer program that generates a unique lightsaber made out of four different parts (blade, hilt, pommel and button) and tweets it out once a day along with some statistics about the lightsaber....

I love Digital Ocean. It’s incredibly easy to set up, it’s cheap to get started and you can scale up easily as your website grows. All of my old sites were hosted on there and when I needed a host for my latest project, Daily Lightsaber, Digital Ocean was the obvious choice. The main feature of Daily Lightsaber is the scheduled post of a new lightsaber every day. To do this I needed to add Cron to my droplet....

In 2019 I read 26 books. This was 9 less than the goal I set in 2018, this was due to a busy personal life (I had a second kid) and changing roles at my company. I also think I got a little burnt out from reading after a fairly quick start. Favourite Books Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change — Ellen Pao I followed along as Ellen’s lawsuit was happening against Kleiner Perkins so reading about it from her point of view and all of the events that led up to it was very interesting....

Warning: This post contains NSFW language. Every year in September over 300 staff from around the world come to Toronto for our annual conference, called G Stock. This is a week-long event that culminates in a keynote by our founder Bruce called The State of G Nation. Back in 2010 when I started at G, I used to track casual curse words Bruce would drop at G Stock via Twitter. In 2014 we decided to take it to eleven and build out a bespoke system to track it....

In 2018, I read 42 books. This was the first time in over 15 years that I really set out to read a lot of books. I used to curl up on a couch or hang out in my bedroom all day reading until my parents forced me to go outside or come to dinner. Then high school, university, work, parenthood and numerous other things got in the way and I never got back into reading....

This post was written by a markov chain. You can read more about how and why it was built here. This meant that not all of the “Freedom” methodology, we also have a few languages. There are some downsides to such a simple ping to major tom, telling it to the API. Routing our backends I mentioned backends a few months and now you have not two journeys, but perhaps a dozen....

This post was written by a recurrent neural network. You can read more about how and why it was built here. As a backend things that the number of deploy developers are asking the number of data from ‘react-intl’ctorce strings in the core’, and the difference of the can zrow and also restore restores the state is to speed up our developers and how we don’t have a service of things we look at the team in...

At G Adventures, we write a lot of content for our various blogs. Our main company blog has over 8 million words and our technical blog is currently sitting at 114,000 words (though I just added another 2500 words through this post and the two generated posts!). Creating this content takes a lot of time and effort from over 40 writers. Recently, the Technology team had a Hack Day and I decided to learn more about Machine Learning (ML) and TensorFlow ....

At G Adventures we deploy 20+ times a day to many different services that handle millions of requests and millions of dollars in transactions by keeping it simple One of my guiding principles for developing and deploying software has always been to keep it as simple as possible for as long as possible. Premature optimization wastes valuable developer time, solving problems that may never be real. One of the areas where this is apparent at G Adventures is how we deploy code....

Technical debt is something that every software company has to deal with at some point. Whether it’s from bad architectural designs or just changing business needs, at some point technical debt will need to be refactored. Here are a few tips I’ve pulled from my experience removing technical debt. Take Inventory The first step in dealing with technical debt is to take inventory of the entire codebase. Knowing the extent of the codebase is necessary before you can start removing or rewriting parts of it....