Robin's Blog

Archive for the ‘Programming’ Category

Travel times, over time

A fun analysis I did a while back was using the Google Maps API to look at travel times between certain locations over time. I originally got interested in this because I found that travelling from my house to the university (yes, that’s how long ago this started…) seemed to either take a very short […]

Pint + SQLAlchemy = Unit consistency and enforcement in your database

Last week I presented a poster at PyData Global 2020, about linking the pint and SQLAlchemy libraries together to provide robust handling of units with databases in Python. The poster is shown below: click to enlarge so you can read the text: The example code is available on Github and is well-commented to make it […]

A Python sqlite3 context manager gotcha

I’ve neglected this blog for a while – partly due to the chaos of 2020 (which is not great), and partly due to being busy with work (which is good!). Anyway, I’m starting to pick it up again, and I thought I’d start with something that caught me out the other day. So, let’s start […]

Automatically downloading nursery photos from ParentZone using Selenium

My son goes to a nursery part-time, and the nursery uses a system called ParentZone from Connect Childcare to send information between us (his parents) and nursery. Primarily, this is used to send us updates on the boring details of the day (what he’s had to eat, nappy changes and so on), and to send […]

Easily specifying colours from the default colour cycle in matplotlib

Another quick matplotlib tip today: specifically, how easily specify colours from the standard matplotlib colour cycle. A while back, when matplotlib overhauled their themes and colour schemes, they changed the default cycle of colours used for lines in matplotlib. Previously the first line was pure blue (color='b' in matplotlib syntax), then red, then green etc. […]

Markdown in WordPress – and writing blog posts is fun again

As you may have noticed, I hadn’t blogged here for quite a while, but have recently started blogging regularly again. This is mostly due to sorting out various WordPress issues I was having, and installing some new plugins to make writing blog posts fun again. Ever since I installed the WordPress update that added the […]