In effort to make things simper, the software developers often reach quite an opposite goal. One such example I’ve suddenly stumbled upon today is GTK Open With dialog: adding a custom item there is, surprisingly, quite a technical task, in a sense that you have to use google, read the docs and edit some files (with a text editor!). I simply had to share the details.

Numba is open-source optimizing compiler for Python. It seems work like magic: just add a simple decorator to your pure-python function, and it immediately becomes 200 times faster – at least, so clames the Wikipedia article about Numba. Even this is hard to believe, but Wikipedia goes further and claims that a vary naive implementation of a sum of a numpy array is 30% faster then numpy.sum. Somehow, I would expect that numpy.sum is as optimized as it can be, so this clame sounds even more ambitious. Let’s check this with some benchmarks!

To the hard people that came from ruthless land of C, many things in Python look like craziness. But with the years are passing, you get to feel like at home with it… until you see something like x % 1.

Why would anyone do that? In production code?

For a simple scripting language Python bears more then enough brain-exploding magic, like metaclasses and descriptors. But what if a simple language construct, in a simple code, just makes you stop and say “WAT?”. That’s exactly what happened to me when I saw this: x = x[::-1]. What does that mean? Let’s take a quick look.

Sometimes it is desirable to put an upper bound on how much space Apache Kafka can use. But it turns out that this is not as trivial as one might imagine — for me, it took several iterations to find the correct settings. The details below.

Heatmaps are awesome: in many cases, using color to represent an extra dimension allows to get good insights on what’s really happening. But how to draw them? Below, I’ll take a quick look onto a couple of ways.

I’ve switched from marked to markdown-it for this site. Here are some hows and whys.

Hi there!

Now, when I ductaped together quite a bit of infrastructure, it’s time to write something for real. I’d also like to describe how and what was done, and how I feel about it.