https://usethe.computer https://usethe.computer/posts/24-blood-from-a-stone.html Wed, 08 Apr 2026 10:45:00 CST Reverse engineering the Petra .GRD grid format. https://usethe.computer/posts/24-blood-from-a-stone.html https://usethe.computer/posts/23-zipping-python-trees.html Thu, 08 Dec 2022 15:30:00 CST Let's walk amongst the trees for a bit. https://usethe.computer/posts/23-zipping-python-trees.html https://usethe.computer/posts/22-surviving-the-energy-to-coding-transition.html Thu, 07 Jan 2021 12:00:00 CST It’s a great time, maybe the best time in the short history of computer technology to date, to learn programming and data science. You’re surrounded by an incredible wealth of free tools and resources, and the excitement about these disciplines in society at large is palpable. But with that wealth comes danger: snake oil salesmen and the “quick fix”. The answer is the same as it always was. https://usethe.computer/posts/22-surviving-the-energy-to-coding-transition.html https://usethe.computer/posts/21-jupyter-ascending.html Tue, 13 Oct 2020 12:00:00 CST Computational notebooks combine literate programming’s interleaving of source text with prose descriptions and multimedia output with image-based development’s interactivity and mutability. It’s the combination of the two ideas that kills notebooks as a practical tool for software engineering. https://usethe.computer/posts/21-jupyter-ascending.html https://usethe.computer/posts/20-fun-with-typestate.html Tue, 21 Jul 2020 12:00:00 CST “There’s an old saying in Tennessee—I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, ‘Fool me once, shame on…shame on you. Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.’” –George W. Bush https://usethe.computer/posts/20-fun-with-typestate.html https://usethe.computer/posts/19-irregular-expressions-revisited.html Fri, 26 Jun 2020 12:00:00 CST Last time, we used a minimalist parser combinator library to build a parser for an oddly familiar language called OBAN. The problem with our previous parser is that it produces extremely unhelpful error messages. This is probably fine for a parser which runs as part of an automated toolchain and processes almost-always-valid input, but is completely unacceptable for a user-facing tool. https://usethe.computer/posts/19-irregular-expressions-revisited.html https://usethe.computer/posts/18-irregular-expressions.html Mon, 22 Jun 2020 12:00:00 CST Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems. –Jamie Zawinski https://usethe.computer/posts/18-irregular-expressions.html https://usethe.computer/posts/17-a-dialogue.html Wed, 03 Jun 2020 12:00:00 CST SOCRATES: What is “machine learning”? https://usethe.computer/posts/17-a-dialogue.html https://usethe.computer/posts/16-the-shadow-knows.html Tue, 26 May 2020 12:00:00 CST It’s a nightmare scenario: trapped behind enemy lines with no hope for rescue. For unfathomable reasons of bureaucracy, your access to Turing-complete tools of the trade has been denied. Will you fight? Or will you perish like a dog (in a mire of spreadsheets)? https://usethe.computer/posts/16-the-shadow-knows.html https://usethe.computer/posts/15-minimalist-dca-in-python.html Wed, 20 May 2020 12:00:00 CST It’s important, as a rule of thumb, when operating or investing in a firm which produces a physical commodity, to have the ability to reliably quantify the expected future production of the commodity given the firm’s assets. In the oil and gas industry, we have many different ways to forecast future production from an oil or gas well. Some rely on detailed measurements and explicitly incorporate detailed mathematical models of flow physics. Others use whatever historical data we can scrape together and a bit of curve-fitting. https://usethe.computer/posts/15-minimalist-dca-in-python.html https://usethe.computer/posts/14-xmhell.html Mon, 11 May 2020 12:00:00 CST A couple weekends ago, I found myself with the desire to fetch oil and gas production data for a specific county in New Mexico from the New Mexico Oil Conservation Division (OCD). https://usethe.computer/posts/14-xmhell.html https://usethe.computer/posts/13-typing-groupby-revisited.html Wed, 29 Apr 2020 12:00:00 CST If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. –Carl Sagan https://usethe.computer/posts/13-typing-groupby-revisited.html https://usethe.computer/posts/12-typing-groupby.html Tue, 28 Apr 2020 12:00:00 CST A few weeks ago, chatting with some friends who also occupy the tiny intersection between engineers and programmers, the topic of “group by” came up in the context of in-memory data management with Python. https://usethe.computer/posts/12-typing-groupby.html https://usethe.computer/posts/11-dashboard-confessional.html Wed, 22 Apr 2020 12:00:00 CST Many clients, friends, acquaintances, and (in the Before Times) strangers in bars have asked me over the years: what do I think about “business intelligence” (BI) tools? These are applications which make it easy, without any custom programming required, to connect to data sources, visualize data, and create interactive analytics and “dashboards”. https://usethe.computer/posts/11-dashboard-confessional.html https://usethe.computer/posts/10-open-recursion-the-essence-of-oo.html Sun, 19 Apr 2020 12:00:00 CST What is object-oriented programming really about? What’s so special about “late binding”? And why do I have to pass self around everywhere in Python? We’ll take a meandering path in today’s post which will try to answer each of these questions, and build our own miniature object system along the way. https://usethe.computer/posts/10-open-recursion-the-essence-of-oo.html https://usethe.computer/posts/9-why-are-data-scientists-switching-from-R-to-python.html Sun, 16 Feb 2020 12:00:00 CST Oh, R. I can’t tell you why “data scientists” have switched, for the same reason I can’t tell you how Santa’s reindeer achieve lift: I simply don’t believe in them. But, I can tell you why I no longer use R for new projects. https://usethe.computer/posts/9-why-are-data-scientists-switching-from-R-to-python.html https://usethe.computer/posts/8-a-mathematicians-lament.html Thu, 07 Dec 2017 12:00:00 CST Today’s Paper of the Day continues this week’s theme of “education”; this time, with a research mathematician turned educator’s thoughts on why K-12 math education ends up leaving so many graduates with negative feelings toward math. https://usethe.computer/posts/8-a-mathematicians-lament.html https://usethe.computer/posts/7-why-teach-programming-languages.html Wed, 06 Dec 2017 12:00:00 CST We continue our celebration (or perhaps examination) of Computer Science Education Week with today’s POTD. https://usethe.computer/posts/7-why-teach-programming-languages.html https://usethe.computer/posts/6-functional-programming-fundamental.html Tue, 05 Dec 2017 12:00:00 CST Today’s POTD continues our theme of Computer Science Education Week. Yesterday we saw a paper (and retraction), and meditated on the topic of why it’s so hard to teach programming. https://usethe.computer/posts/6-functional-programming-fundamental.html https://usethe.computer/posts/5-potd-the-camel-has-two-humps.html Mon, 04 Dec 2017 12:00:00 CST This week is Computer Science Education Week! It’s an initiative I watch each year with a mix of admiration and dread; I’m dead convinced that our society needs to expose more students to computer science, not fewer; that programming is getting more accessible and relevant, not less; that the only way to build diversity of experience and perspective downstream in industry and academia is to construct education programs that appeal to diverse populations upstream. https://usethe.computer/posts/5-potd-the-camel-has-two-humps.html https://usethe.computer/posts/4-potd-dunning-kruger.html Fri, 01 Dec 2017 12:00:00 CST Today’s POTD is a well-known classic in the genre of “social sciences research that confirms what we’ve always suspected: people are terrible”. https://usethe.computer/posts/4-potd-dunning-kruger.html https://usethe.computer/posts/3-potd-machine-learning.html Thu, 30 Nov 2017 12:00:00 CST The Paper of the Day for today comes to us from the distant past: a time before venture capital firms would seemingly hurl trebuchet-loads of money at anyone with a “.ai” domain name and the ability to spell “deep learning”. (I’ve been working on this long enough that my folder of papers on machine learning and data science is labeled “AI”.) https://usethe.computer/posts/3-potd-machine-learning.html https://usethe.computer/posts/2-potd-gadt-oop.html Wed, 29 Nov 2017 12:00:00 CST Today’s POTD presents a translation of a great tool from the functional programming community into the more mundane world of 90s-style object-oriented programming languages. https://usethe.computer/posts/2-potd-gadt-oop.html https://usethe.computer/posts/1-learning-to-code.html Sun, 26 Jun 2016 12:00:00 CST A recent discussion on the SPE discussion board inspired me to jot down some thoughts on how a young (or experienced!) petroleum engineer—or for that matter any other technically skilled non-programmer—might best engage with “learning to code”. https://usethe.computer/posts/1-learning-to-code.html