The Attack of the Online "Productivity" "Experts" I first heard this from Oliver Burkeman in one of his courses. He said something like The problem with most productivity advice is it seems to be written by people in their 20s with no family committment. What did he mean? This phenomena I've seen a lot. According to the
Python Tip: Always Use a Virtual Environment I have been using Python so long that using a virtual environment for each project has become second nature. But I recently had the chance to work with beginners and had to explain why a venv is needed. The actual steps of creating an environment is easy– 1 or 2
The 7 (Cynical) Laws of Software Testing Note: This post has been sitting in my draft folder for almost a year, and I don't know what to do with it. It started off as a serious post, but then moved to a cynical take on software testing. I planned to rewrite it one way or the other
ChatGPT and the AI Apocalypse Whenever people think of AI's going rogue, they think of a Terminator like scenario: the AI says F*ck it, don't need to humans no more. Let's kill them all Cue inspirational music and our heroes fightin' the good fight. But I would like to propose the AI apocalypse, if
The Most Useful Command Line Tools (2023 edition) In the last few years, there has been a renaissance in command-line utilities. If you are still using utilities written 30 years ago (groan) you will be in for a surprise. The functionality might be the same but the UX(or is it developer experience) is a million times better.
Programming Interviews Turn Normal People into A-Holes Subtitle: Yet Another Tech Interviewing Post There are hundreds and hundreds of blogs about how programming interviews suck, how they ask trivia questions or try to ask questions that only fresh graduates would know well (sort binary trees is the classical example). All these theories are correct, but I have
Web Automation: Don't Use Selenium, Use Playwright For web automation/testing, Selenium has been the de facto "standard" since forever. It's simple to get started with and supports almost every programming language. My problem with it has been: It's good enough, but nothing more. It doesn't work that well with modern, Javascript framework heavy sites (Angular, React
game How To Structure Your Godot Project (so You Don't Get Confused) This is a guest post by KP, whom I found by a very detailed and thoughtful comment he posted on Reddit /r/godot [https://old.reddit.com/r/godot/]. If you like the post, make sure to check out his Youtube channel [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7rTlSePagQ4wsRkP2ChL0A] A tale
Learning Go as a Python Developer: The Good and The Bad I've been thinking about supplementing another language to Python for some time – mainly to cope with areas Python struggles with, or is a pain to use (which I'll go over in a minute). I had used C/C++ some years ago, but don't want to go back to them. C
My Poor Experience With Azure (or why I'm sticking with AWS) AWS has a lot of haters. Lots of horror cases where people thought they were on the free account but ended up with a $20,000 bill. We are told Azure has a much better model. You have to manually move to a paid service. No surprise bills. Like AWS,
Learning about AWS/Cloud by Building Practical Projects I heard about the Cloud challenge [https://cloudresumechallenge.dev/docs/the-challenge/aws/] some time ago and liked the idea-- of building a practical project to show you Cloud/AWS knowledge. The challenge just builds a simple online resume, which is fine as the challenge is aimed at complete beginners. I
The Problem with Most Programming Tutorials / Books Or Why they all suck (and how to improve them) I can't remember the number of tutorials / books on programming I've had to abandon, because the author jumped to advanced concepts too fast, or tried to teach too many concepts at the same time. Having worked with beginners and been
What the United States Camel Corps Taught Me About Software Engineering Recently, I saw a cool featured article on Wikipedia: The United States Camel Corps [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Camel_Corps]. And as I was reading it, I was thinking to myself That's exactly how software engineers think as well! Let me summarise the article first: * In the
The Harsh Truth of Video Games Programming I've been interested in games programming since I started learning programming as a teenager more than 25 years ago (gasp!) I started with Qbasic and Gorillas.bas, but never understood the code. Of course, I didn't get anywhere at the time, beyond very basic games. I wrote a simple Shoot
game Godot Tips 'n Tricks 'n Gotchas In this post I want to document all the useful tips and gotchas I found when using Godot. It's a living document, so will be updated regularly as I learn more * Area vs StaticBody vs RigidBody vs Kinematic Body * Vehicle Body * Animated Sprite vs Animation Player vs Animation Tree * Animation
fun How to Create an NFT Using Windows Notepad (and make millions!) In this post, I will show you how to create a 100% UNIQUE and NON-FUNGIBLE NFT using nothing but Windows Notepad (and not even Notepad++)! I have downloaded a monkey image from Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey](because NFT is not Real NFT⁽ᵀᴹ⁾ until it comes with
Cool Python libraries I want to try in 2022 This isn't a post about my favourite Python libraries (iPython and Jupyter, pipx). Instead, I want to talk about cool Python libraries I've been hearing about, and want to try out In no particular order: The BeeWare Tools: https://docs.beeware.org/en/latest/ I have been aware of BeeWare
Godot Game Series is now complete! Hey there, The Godot tutorial I've been writing is now complete( well, complet-ish, I can always add more stuff). Rather than sending a dozen emails as each part is completed, I'm just sending one email. Please have a look: https://new.pythonforengineers.com/godot-games-programming/ cheers Shantnu
game Add a UI to our Game and Export the Project This is Part 6 of the Godot series. Read Previous Parts here. [https://new.pythonforengineers.com/godot-games-programming/] All the code is here [https://github.com/shantnu/godot-beginners], under Part 6 In this post, we will prety-fy our game a little– add game start and over screens, add a heads up
game Adding Enemies to Our Game This is Part 5 of the Godot series. Read Previous Parts here. [https://new.pythonforengineers.com/godot-games-programming/] All the code is here [https://github.com/shantnu/godot-beginners], under Part 5 In this post, we will add an enemy to our game. The enemy will walk left and right, and we
game Setting Up Layers and Masks in Godot This is Part 4.1 of the Godot series. Read Previous Parts here. [https://new.pythonforengineers.com/godot-games-programming/] Why do we need layers? Layers make sure we don't have situations like the enemy dying on a spike, or taking a coin. While we could write code for it, layers are
game Adding Obstacles and Coins to Our Level This is Part 4 of the Godot series. Read Previous Parts here. [https://new.pythonforengineers.com/godot-games-programming/] All the code is here [https://github.com/shantnu/godot-beginners], under Part 4 The problem in our previous code was if we fell over the edge, we kept falling. We need to detect
game Godot: Level Design and Adding a Camera Object This is Part 3 of the Godot series. Part 1 [https://new.pythonforengineers.com/blog/getting-started-with-godot/]and Part 2 are here. In this post, we will start designing our level. All the code is here, under Part 3. [https://github.com/shantnu/godot-beginners] To start off, go ahead and delete
game Godot: Player Animation This post continues from the 1st one– Read Part 1 if you haven't [https://new.pythonforengineers.com/blog/getting-started-with-godot/]. In this post, we'll add player animation All the code is here [https://github.com/shantnu/godot-beginners], under Part 2 Player Animation Till now, our player moves, but isn't really animated.
game Getting Started with Godot Game Programming for Complete Beginners In this post, we will start with a very basic Godot script, that will move a player left and right, add some gravity. All the code is here [https://github.com/shantnu/godot-beginners]. Part 1 is the directory with the code. I'm using Godot version 3.x for this tutorial.
