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The standard library logging module is excellent. It is also quite tedious if you want to use it in a production system. In particular you have to figure out the following: configuration of the formatters, handlers, and loggers object management throughout the script (e.g. the logging.getLogger function) adding extra context to log messages for more complex formatters handling and logging warnings (and to a lesser extent, exceptions) The logging module actually does all of these things. The problem is that it doesn’t do them all at once for you, or with one single API. Therefore we typically go the route that we want to wrap the logging module so that we can provide extra context on demand, as well as handle warnings with ease. Moreover, once we have a wrapped logger, we can do fun things like create mixins to put together classes that have loggers inside of them. ...

Let’s face it, most of the Python programs we write are going to be used from the command line. There are tons of command line interface helper libraries out there. My preferred CLI method is the style of Django’s management utility. More on this later, when we hopefully publish a library that gives us that out of the box (we use it in many of our projects already). Sometimes though, you just want a simple CLI script. These days we use the standard library argparse module to parse commands off the command line. Here is my basic script that I use for most of my projects: ...

I don’t use project templates like cookiecutter. I’m sure they’re fine, but when I start a new project I like to get a cup of coffee, go to my zen place and manually create the workspace. It gets me in the right place to code. Here’s the thing, there is a right way to set up a Python project. Plus, I have a particular style for my repositories — particularly how I use Creative Commons Flickr photos as the header for my README files. ...

I have a bit of catch up to do — and I think that this notepad and development journal is the perfect resource to do it. You see, I am constantly copy and pasting code from other projects into the current project that I’m working on. Usually this takes the form of a problem that I had solved previously that has a similar domain to a new problem, but requires a slight amount of tweaking. Other times I am just doing the same task over and over again. ...

My family does “one big gift” every Christmas; that is instead of everyone simply buying everyone else a smaller gift; every person is assigned to one other person to give them a single large gift. Selection of who gives what to who is a place of some (minor) conflict. Therefore we simply use a random algorithm. Unfortunately, apparently a uniform random sample of pairs is not enough, therefore we take 100 samples to vote for each combination to see who gets what as follows: ...

Natural Language Processing and Hadoop Description Benjamin Bengfort and Sean Murphy discuss how NLP can be integrated with Hadoop to gain insights in big data.

Description Presentation by the CTO of Unbound Concepts, Benjamin Bengfort, at the Columbia TechBreakfast 2012.