Python

I’m currently learning as much computer science as I can on the side. I’ve come across Big O notation a few times already, and while I understand it, I’m much more of a visual guy. It’s rather easy to use Python and matplotlib to graph out how a function’s execution time grows as the size of the input grows. The important things to note is not total execution time, but rather how the runtime of that function grows in relation to the input size. This can be plotted onto a graph which should give us a nice representation of Big O notations. ...

I created two new twitter accounts yesterday and the amount of followers in such a short time is great to see. Feel free to follow them here – @bgp4_table and @bgp6_table The accounts get updated through Python, and that Python script is run via a cron job once every six hours. I noticed that when I ran my script manually, it worked fine. When the cronjob ran it, nothing happened. As there is no console log it made me wonder what the issue was. ...

The first ‘proper’ Python app I made logged onto a list of devices and pulled out OSPF state. This worked perfectly fine. The app correctly works out whether it can log into a device or not, and waits a few seconds to ensure a device actually responds. The issue is that if I have a list of say 1000 devices, and 500 of them don’t respond, the amount of time you need to wait rapidly increases as it looks at each one in turn. Would it not be better for the app to be able to log into multiple devices at the same time in parallel? This would drastically reduce the runtime. ...

I’ve just started with object oriented programming in Python so I thought I’d cover some of the basics here. Please don’t assume this is a thorough tutorial on OOP! The beauty of OOP is that it allows me to create a template with which I can create objects. The building blocks of the object sit in the class, while the object itself is created from that blueprint with various properties. I can then make as many of these objects as I desire from that single class. I can see this being very beneficial for certain types of programming (games especially) ...