Come and code with me!

2025-02-18
Write more elegant Plotly Dash clientside callbacks completely in Python

As a Dash developer, I wanted a way to write clean, maintainable code without constantly switching between Python and JavaScript. Writing clientside logic inside a string felt clunky, and I knew there had to be a way to take advantage of quick clientside features of Dash without sacrificing the readability and syntax-highlighting of my code.

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2025-02-15
Creating Modular Web Components in Plotly Dash with BaseComponent

When building applications with Plotly Dash, it’s not that easy to adhere to Modular Web Design. One common challenge is managing component IDs. Typically, developers define an ID in one place and reference it in another, leading to scattered logic that can be difficult to maintain. Inspired by Dash’s All-in-One Components, I set out to create a more modular approach. This led to the development of dash-basecomponent, a Python package that simplifies component structuring while promoting modular web design.

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2024-08-09
Monitoring Windows usage in Python: A Step-by-Step Guide

Monitoring what happens on your computer can be incredibly useful, whether you’re trying to track your productivity, analyze how you spend your time, or even ensure that certain applications are being used efficiently. Python makes this task approachable and powerful by allowing you to interact directly with the Windows operating system. Let’s dive into the concepts and build a monitoring tool from scratch, step by step, using the interactive Python terminal.

Step 1: Getting the Active Window Title

The first thing we want to do is identify the active window—that is, the window currently in focus on your screen. We’ll use the pywin32 library, which provides a direct interface with Windows APIs. Start by installing the necessary package:

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2024-04-25
'ControlMaster auto' for reusing SSH connections

Just add these two lines to your ~/.ssh/config and you’re good to go!

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2023-03-03
Passwordless SSH between systems that share a /home

Just thought I’d share this nugget of knowledge with you all. If you work on linux systems that share a /home directory, that may be NFS-mounted across several other systems, then you can take advantage of this so you don’t have to enter your password every time you ssh between the linux systems.

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2022-07-12
Creating a CLI with Shell Scripting

When tasked to automate anything within Linux, you might find that Shell is the easiest tool to get the job done fast. Most of the time these shell scripts are built for a specific purpose and don’t have any need for configuration in different usage scenarios. However, it is possible to build a fully fleshed Command Line Interface (CLI) using a shell script, which I will outline for you the steps on how to do this.

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2021-05-15
Learn coding on FreeCodeCamp without internet access

Not all of us have the privilege of having access to the internet at all times of the day. Imagine someone who travels to another city to attend a coding bootcamp, where they learn code with the help of freecodecamp.org, but when they go home, they can’t continue to learn on their own because they don’t have access to the internet at their home. Imagine also another person who struggles to learn to code on their own during the 4 hours every day when the internet happens to be working. This is the reality for many who aspire to learn how to code.

In this guide, I will show you how to run freecodecamp.org offline, so you can complete coding certifications completely without internet access.

FreeCodeCamp offline

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2021-05-12
You can now follow my blog on Follow.it!

For more than a year this blog used a Google Form for managing subscriptions, and relied on me to manually copy all the emails and write a newsletter to keep you all updated.

There has been an upgrade…

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2021-05-10
Intro to Github Pages: Create a simple and free personal website

The world of web development can be insanely complex and overwhelming, however building a simple website doesn’t have to be difficult. Many people’s needs can be fulfilled simply by taking 30 minutes to set up a website on Github pages completely for free.

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2020-05-20
Quickstart to Plaid Financial API using Django

I am not endorsed in any way by Plaid to share this info, just helping others get a head start on using Plaid with Django.

Plaid is a plaform-as-a-service API which you can use to build your own financial apps. It has features such as easily linking to existing bank accounts, and also auto-categorization of transactions. Plaid’s API brings all the data from different financial sources into one place and one format so you can build apps with a holistic view of a user’s finances.

Ok. Now all praise of Plaid aside, I’m sure you are here because you want to build a Django app that uses Plaid to obtain users’ financial data. In all of Plaid’s tutorials shown in their quickstart github page, they have a tutorial for Python, but it’s using Flask for the backend rather than Django.

I’ve taken the time to translate their tutorial from Flask to Django. The main difference was Django’s requirement of having CSRF protection.

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