Okay. I know it’s already February and that it’s kinda late. But it’s in times like this that I say “better late than never!”. But as I’ll show, I’ve already started with my resolutions—I’m just writing about them now.
But since this is my coding blog, the resolution I will mention here will be my technical-life resolution (as opposed to the personal ones everybody makes). So, without further ado…
I resolve to learn a new technology every month. Or, at least, get deeper with one I’m already acquainted with.
Also, I’d go into programming competitions/contests again. Team requirements limit my choices but, hey, there are a lot I can do alone online, not to mention free! (Though if anyone wants to team-up with me, let’s talk.)
And, just so I’ll stick with it, I’ll write a blog post every month about what I’ve been up to. Consider this the one for January.
For my first resolution, I created this sandbox repository at GitHub. And since my GitHub account is, in itself, already my sandbox of sorts, I guess this is some sandbox-ception eh?
January, I did sockets in Python. I didn’t manage to dig as deep as I’d have wanted because the Facebook Hacker Cup kicked in earlier than I expected and that falls under my second resolution. So it had to give way. Besides, I’m already dealing with a few sockets too many at work.
Regarding my second resolution, I don’t really expect much from it. At least, I won’t get rusty from the lack of problem sets in the real world (read: industry). At most, I might score a free trip to some world finals. But that world-finals scenario is still very out of my league. I’ve been doing ACM-ICPC problems since I was in my sophomore year in College and even now I find most of them really tough and tricky. Also, after less than a year out of school, I’m bound to have some rust in my system (not that school is a sure fire way to keep you sharp though). I only decided to start practicing with my algorithms sometime in December so there isn’t really much to expect.
(Note: I started writing this post in the last hour before the first round of Hacker Cup started. It’s now over and everything fell within my expectations. There’s a lot to learn. Maybe, I’ll write about this soon.)
So, what do I think about sockets in Python? (This will be short since, as mentioned, I didn’t have much time to dig deep into this.)
As with all things Python, it looks super neat. I got a client and server up and running in just 41 lines of code combined. The biggest savings comes from the fact that socket I/O is direct in Python; you no longer have to create OutputStream and InputStream objects as the socket objects themselves have methods for sending and receiving. It’s also interesting to note that Python’s socketserver class has a serve_forever method which, as the name implies, handles requests as long as it can (the official phrase is: “until an explicit shutdown signal is received”).
Oddly, this design reminds me how I handled one of the things I did at work. Won’t go into the details but I thought that it’s neat to have one class responsible for managing one whole session: packet numbers, windowing, etc. One instance of a class maps to one client; when client goes away so does this instance (at least, I no longer care if the garbage collector marks it as garbage). Makes OO live more peacefully with concurrency.
Awesome that Python enforces this design by default. Really, the more I discover about Python, the lovelier programming gets.
‘Till I get my February experiments done! ~Chad