How to Exploit All of You For Traffic

People go through a few different stages of programming Python, and one of the last is learning to optimize well and without sacrificing the quality of the code. When a piece of code is bottlenecking, it comes time to look at how you can really turn a turtle into a hare. Or, should that be the other way around?

I want to showcase ways this transformation is possible so I'm going to make a call for anyone to submit code that needs optimized. The next post in this series will show how the code was optimized, what techniques might have been tried and would have failed, and maybe some tips about why the changes worked. There will also be a sample of unoptimized code at the end, with the challenge for improvements to be sent in. From there, if the series has interest, it will continue and maybe evolve.

Send in samples of code you think could be faster. They can be real world or fake, as long as they are realistic. It doesn't matter how poorly written they are, but we need to know what it does. It needs to actually work. The best submissions will be a single function and a docstring that tells me what it can be called with and what it should be expected to do. Things that can unittest well and don't rely on things from the outside are best.

So, impress me, everyone, with the worst code you've got.

Comments

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer. One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operat...

Announcing Feet, a Python Runner

I've been working on a problem that's bugged me for about as long as I've used Python and I want to announce my stab at a solution, finally! I've been working on the problem of "How do i get this little thing I made to my friend so they can try it out?" Python is great. Python is especially a great language to get started in, when you don't know a lot about software development, and probably don't even know a lot about computers in general. Yes, Python has a lot of options for tackling some of these distribution problems for games and apps. Py2EXE was an early option, PyInstaller is very popular now, and PyOxide is an interesting recent entry. These can be great options, but they didn't fit the kind of use case and experience that made sense to me. I'd never really been about to put my finger on it, until earlier this year: Python needs LÖVE . LÖVE, also known as "Love 2D", is a game engine that makes it super easy to build ...

Using a React Context as a Dispatch Replacement

React Contexts are the pretty little bows of the React world. Here's a really quick example of the kind of messy code you can cleanup by using contexts, without dragging in a larger dependency like Redux or even Flux. Starting backwards with a diff showing lines of code I was able to remove: All the properties I was able to remove were just pass-through. The Carousel component didn't care about any of them, but it had to pass through these callbacks so the multiple TaskList components inside the carousel could invoke actions. They were removed from the Component class itself, too, since it no longer needed to pass them through. Where did they all go? My ActionContext removed all the need for these passthroughs by providing a single simple helper method, action(), that components rendered under it can access. I really enjoy the pattern of passing a single callback through a context and removing what used to be lots of callback properties. Of course, I cou...

Developing Upwards

Search This Blog