Following the success of my article The surreal experience of my first developer job, which made it to the top of Hacker News for a whole day, I was invited to tell the story on the excellent podcast Client Horror Stories. The video is available on clienthorrorstories.com: Thanks to Morgan for...
For the last few months in BBC News Labs, I've been working on various projects involving extracting metadata from running orders for BBC programmes such as Newsnight and the R4 Today programme. Like many traditional broadcasters, the BBC uses the MOS Protocol for communications between newsroom...
Nearly ten years ago I graduated with a degree in Mathematics & Computing, with a keen interest in pursuing a career involving maths and programming, but with little idea how. First and foremost I had decided to stay in Manchester after uni, rather than risk getting stuck at my parents’ if I moved...
Dave and I just did a release of GPIO Zero, our Raspberry Pi GPIO library. It's been over 18 months since the last release, and as well as plenty of small bugfixes and corrections to the documentation, there are a few nice new features too. The highlights: Rotary Encoder Multi-segment displays,...
PyPI, the Python package index, provides a JSON API for information about its packages. This is essentially a machine-readable source of the same kind of data you can access while browsing the website. For example, as a human, I can head to the numpy project page in my browser, click around and see...
The Jupyter project started out as IPython and the IPython Notebook. It was originally a Python-specific interactive shell and notebook environment which later branched out to become language-agnostic, supporting Julia, Python and R – and potentially anything else. IPython is a Python shell –...
I've now completed a full year working as software engineer in the News Labs team at the BBC. It's been an odd year, obviously, but we've been cracking on with all kinds of projects – finding new ways to help journalists do their jobs; innovating around user experiences in news products and...
For some time, Python has had support for managing virtual environments. Python 3.3 even added the built-in module venv for creating environments without third-party libraries. There are a number of different tools Python programmers use to manage their environments and the one I use is...