October 1st, 2011 | by Derek Willis | published in Code, Python
When Heroku announced Python support this past week, I was interested in seeing how the deployment process worked compared to how Heroku handles Ruby apps. Then a post highlighted by the Python Weekly newsletter caught my eye. Swizec Teller’s entry, “Measuring vocabulary richness with Python“, described an algorithm by George Udny Yule in a 1944 [...]
February 23rd, 2010 | by Derek Willis | published in Python
As part of our roll-out of version 3 of the NYT Congress API, I was tasked with coming up with a sample application that uses the API to do something mildly interesting, or at least functional. I had gotten a book on Google App Engine for my birthday and was pretty excited to see that [...]
January 24th, 2010 | by Derek Willis | published in django, Mapping, Python
Update: Simon has updated his library to make it easy to reverse the order of coordinates. Thanks! For a “15-minute project“, Simon Willison’s geocoders library is pretty handy if you’re doing geocoding with Python. It offers a common interface to the geocoding services provided by Google, Yahoo and other sources. When we were looking at [...]
November 25th, 2009 | by Derek Willis | published in django, Python
I haven’t mentioned Fumblerooski in awhile, but rest assured that work continues, especially during college football season. I’ve added more coaching information (still a long ways to go on that, though) and will be unveiling player rankings soon. But the biggest thing I’ve done lately has nothing to do with new features. Instead, as I’ve [...]
March 1st, 2009 | by Derek Willis | published in Python
So we’ve got this Congress API at The Times, which already has spawned a Ruby shell by Patrick Ewing (a shell being a really neat idea, as well as useful in building apps). I decided to try and get my feet wet with writing a Python library to interact with the API, too, and the [...]