Programming

I have recently decided to quit my current job and pursue a career as a developer. This decision has been in the making for a while and only matured a short time ago, still I feel like it’s the right thing for me to do. Obviously, I’ll need to apply for jobs and for that I need to get the paperwork in order. I need to update my CV to make sense when applying for coding jobs (as opposed to scientific positions in academia) and I need a cover letter for every job I’m applying to although a basic template that I can edit as the need arises should be sufficient. ...

This is a short story about performance, profiling and optimization. First, some backstory. For my current job I’m doing quantum chemical calculations on proteins. If this doesn’t mean anything to you, don’t worry, it’s not important for this article. However, this means that I’m working with data files that contain the structure of proteins a lot. The most popular file format is called PDB and the part of it that is interesting to me is the information about atoms, atom names, atom types, atom positions and so on. ...

A while ago I decided to learn a new programming language. I don’t exactly remember why but I felt like I wanted to. There were two candidates I was interested in, Rust and Julia. A colleague of mine really loves Julia and I’ve read a bit about it so I was interested enough to give it a try. Also, it is heavily geared towards scientists and scientific computing including data science so it seemed like a natural thing for me to try. ...

I’m currently experiencing the pleasure of collaborating on an open source project with someone else on GitHub and I love doing it. There was an issue with runtime performance and we looked into it, discussed ideas and coded up several prototypic solutions (I admit mine were rather dirty). At one point I reviewed someone else’s pull request and wanted to add something to it. Sure, I can use the online editing features of GitHub but that doesn’t really tie in well with my code-writing workflow, not to mention that all the autocompletion, linting and inline compiler errors won’t be present. So I looked for a way to push a commit to someone else’s pull request that I could prepare locally. I searched and found a good solution which I’m gonna write up here as reference for future me. ...

Whenever you start a project in Python you probably want to do it in a fresh environment so as not to have your dependencies clash with those of other projects, prevent version mismatch or other unexpected breakage. The way to do this is by using virtual environments. As far as I know there are several ways to do this in Python (as always…) but the most prevalent, it seems to me, is using the builtin venv module. ...