Peter's Blog

StorageBox is a Python module that allows you to put items inside a storagebox (commonly referred to as the "Item Bank") and take items outside of the "Item Bank". As is the case with any physical storage box, the number of items you put in, is exactly the number of items you can take out. Nothing is lost and/or duplicated due to multiple distributed nodes doing simultaneous read/writes. StorageBox is ideal for projects that need to be developed really quickly without needing to worry about all potential race conditions. From a running cost prespective, It's also ideal for projects that receive a burst of requests at a specific point in time and then things start calming down. At the current state, StorageBox works with Amazon's DynamoDB but the same algorithm can be used with other databases! How does it work behind the scenes? Think of a Digital Box Let's start simple and imagine your run a movie store! You have 3 voucher codes you'd like to give t...

So maybe you're a team focused on Python and you've been looking into the best ways to deliver your packages to other members of your team or even to production environments. You start having thoughtful debate about the issu *skip forward* you realize that pip might be your best option; everybody knows how to use pip , it works perfectly with virtual environments, does dependency management, it's basically awesome. But then reality hits you; In order to use pip , you need a PyPI repository to host your code and you don't want all your team's hard work to be out on the public PyPI repository  for obvious reasons. So you start looking around learning how to build a private PyPI repository and you stumble upon  PEP 503 -- Simple Repository API . Huzzah! You finally figured out how this thing works but then you go like Oh man, so I have to get a machine, install web server software on it, go through all the trouble of setting it up and using best practices, an...

Hello everyone, sorry I haven’t blogged for a while but I was busy with other matters and barely managed to allocate enough time over the weeks to write this article. My last article was about how you can use Python to bind to class attributes together so that updating one automatically updates the other. I also demonstrated how we used this method in a college project to implement a MIPS processor by defining each block, defining its inputs and outputs (in terms of inputs) and then, using the demonstrated method, tell Python that the output of this block is connected to the input of the other block and just letting everything evaluate itself automatically. This was, by far, the most viewed article on my blog, so if you haven’t read this article, I recommend you go do that now, just follow this link . The old article also contains a lot of essential background which is required for understanding this article, so if you want to make the most of this article, read the old one firs...

You can also read this article from my LinkedIn here . If you’re not interested in my personal motivation to do this, you can skip right to the Essential Python Background section. Introduction During my last semester, my friends and I were studying a course called Computer Architecture . This course covered topics concerning how a computer processor works and how it is built and wired up internally. As a project, we were asked to build a software simulator that should be given input in the same manner a computer processor is given input, and then it produces the same output as the processor. After a lot of discussion, and despite facing some opposition, we decided that Python was the right tool for the job. The thing is, we had something in mind, that would make the whole process a trivial piece of cake but that something was not offered by default in Python. We had to build it ourselves. I was given the task of making this magic happen and I will explain what this magic wa...