Andrew Brookins

In Python I often use the __file__ constant to get the directory of the current file (e.g., os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath(__file__))). While writing a Go app recently, I found that there wasn’t an immediately obvious (or searchable, even with “golang”) equivalent. But in the annals of the golong-nuts mailing list I eventually found out about runtime.Caller(). This returns …

With the dev builds of Sublime Text 2, you can easily set up a build system that runs Django unit tests. You do this by adding a build system to your Sublime Text 2 project file for the Django project. I’ll include an example project file in this post that runs manage.py test –noinput as …

When profiling a Python app, it’s helpful to have a decorator that wraps functions and reports details about their performance. Assuming you are doing this to report some metric about the function, you’ll want the decorator to work with both bound and unbound functions (IE, regular functions and methods of a class), and if the …

I’ve been trying out Sublime Text 2 as a replacement for Vim. While I enjoy using it and I experienced the “Wow, this does 90% of what Vim does” moment, I kept a running list of all the features in the remaining 10% that I relied on every day. These included: Better code wrapping (gq) …

The OS X apps iA Writer and Notational Velocity are great for writing and taking notes, respectively. I wanted to try using them together, by setting iA Writer as the external editor for Notational Velocity, but after doing so I noticed that iA Writer would not open with the keyboard shortcut (Command-Shift-E), and it was …

I finally discovered the cause of my #1 OS X problem: slow scrolling in Vim, both in Terminal.app and in MacVim. There was always a marked difference between Vim on my Mac and Vim on Linux. Scrolling with the movement keys (j/k in particular) was blindingly fast on Linux, but plodded along on my Mac so …