Blog Posts

All my blog posts and articles

Page 1 of 141 (2813 total posts)

February 2026

Salas.com rebuilt and cleaned up with the help of Claude Code

General

If this site looks a little different to you, it’s because I am doing a complete overhaul using Claude code. I have drunk the cool aid 100%! Over the last 2 months I’ve done a lot of “coding”. Actually very liittle coding, more directing Claude Code to code for me. I am using Python ouf of habit ...

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August 2025

Coding is forever changed

General

Continuing a theme of the previous blog, I am starting to really believe that programming, coding, software development is going to be forever changed. I say this, among other things, from the perspective of someone who has taught software engineering, development, and intro programming courses. I...

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I used to be a human coder

General

You have heard how in the long distant past we had people whose job was "Computer". They were people who computed. They worked alongside mathematicians and engineers (I suppose) to make complicated calculations. I suppose they worked with strict numerical problems but also with estimates, or solving...

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July 2025

My experiences with Claude Code - semi vibe

General

All the code for this new version of my web site was written by claude code. Yes, I am not exagerating. Here are some of my take aways. Amazing Yes, start with admiting that it is amazing. This is a fairly simple application but it has a fair number of moving parts. The code is all open source ...

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Easing Algorithms

General

Easing is the process of gradually increasing (or decreasing) a value to from a start to a target, without just jumping to the target. Used in computer animation. I used it for powering servos in an arm in a graceful way. There are simple Easing Equations to accomplish this.

prettymaps: Simple access to OpenStreetmaps

General

Open Streetmaps is one of the nicest packages for maps. But using it is really messy. Prettymaps is a package that makes it easy to use OpenStreetMaps, in python. It contains a small set of Python functions to draw pretty maps from OpenStreetMap data. Based on osmnx, matplotlib and shapely libraries.

January 2024

December 2023

Configuration in Python Applications: No Magic, Just Necessary Practice

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Configuration in Python Applications: No Magic, Just Necessary Practice –During the development of Python applications, I’ve continually asked myself how and when variables should be passed and initialized for the application’s configuration. I want to be able to easily override the configuration for tests, for example, to use a local database for testing. But what exactly is application configuration, and why is it needed? The website a …