Improving your programming style in Python
Some references on software development techniques and patterns to help write better code.
selected posts
Cython example of exposing C-computed arrays in Python without data copies
Some advice on passing arrays from C to Python avoiding copies. I use Cython as I have found the code to be more maintainable than hand-written Python C-API code.
I found out that there was no self-contained example of creating numpy arrays from existing data in Cython. Thus I created …
Software design for maintainability
I have just spent the best part of my Sunday fixing a bug that turned out being a seemingly-trivial two-liner. Such unpleasant experiences are all too frequent, and weight a lot on my view of code design.
My stance on code design
I call code design the process of designing …
Simple object signatures
A signature pattern
There are many libraries around to specify what I call a ‘signature’ for an object, in other words a list of attributes that define its parameter set. I have heavily used Enthought’s Traits library for this purpose, but the concept is fairly general and can be …
Making posters for scientific conferences
Some advices and examples on making posters for scientific conference.
Personal views on scientific computing
My contributions to the scientific computing software ecosystem are motivated by my vision on computational science.
Scientific research relies more and more on computing. However, most of the researchers are not software engineers, and as computing is becoming ubiquitous, the limiting factor becomes more and more the human factor [G …
PCA and ICA: Identifying combinations of variables
Dimension reduction and interpretability
Suppose you have statistical data that too many dimensions, in other words too many variables of the same random process, that has been observed many times. You want to find out, from all these variables (or all these dimensions when speaking in terms of multivariate data …
Decoration in Python done right: Decorating and pickling
Decoration is a fantastic pattern in Python that allows for very light-weight metaprograming with functions rather than objects (see this article for an in-depth discussion). However, when decorating, it is very easy to break another great feature of the language: its reflectivity and its ability to do static representations of …
Useful trick for functions and tests using np.random
How to test functions that use the numpy random number generator
Tracking objects in scientific code
When I started working in my new field (data analysis of functional brain images), I was surprised to find in our data-analysis scripts what I thought was a very particular code smell: the numerical code is always doing a lot of filename and path manipulation, loading and saving data even …