Mike Staszel

If you really want to get into the details of Python and learn about how the language was built and how some of its internals are implemented, Fluent Python is the book for you. It’s a great book to refresh your knowledge of coroutines, asyncio, and other Python goodies.

I just finished reading “Hello, Startup” by Yevgeniy Brikman, a book written for programmers about starting a startup. All the basics are covered, including hiring, teamwork, startup culture, and development methodology while scaling a startup. It’s a nice quick read (I skimmed through the chapters about development, programming, databases, and other technical chapters, but I found the other content to be a great place to start learning about what it takes to build a startup.

This weekend while running a rather large Python job, I ran into a memory error. It turned out that a dictionary I was populating could potentially become too big to fit into RAM. This is where DiskDict saved me some time. https://github.com/AWNystrom/DiskDict/ It’s definitely not the best way to solve an issue, but in this case I was working with a limited system where rewriting the surrounding code would have been intrusive.

Recently I ran into a problem while working with Amazon EC2 servers. Servers without dedicated elastic IP addresses would get a different IP address every time they were started up! This proved to be a challenge when trying to SSH in to the servers. How can I have a dynamic domain name that always points to my EC2 server? Amazon’s Route53 came to mind. Route53, however, does not have a simple way to point a subdomain directly to an EC2 instance.