Weeknotes for the week finishing Friday, 30 May 2025.

I updated my script for creating weeknotes. It now creates an article for a given date, rather than for today’s date, which means I’m less likely to run it on Friday and struggle to remember what I did that …

I became a tech lead in December 2024. My team is small: just Alice, a junior developer, and me. We were asked to work alongside researchers and health informaticians on the OpenPathology project with the aim of designing, implementing, and evaluating dashboards. Here, I’d like to reflect on my …

Weeknotes for the week finishing Friday, 23rd May 2025.

Katie showed me a code snippet within which I noticed the following idiom:

del a_list[:]

I was sure that [:] copied the list, but I wasn’t sure what del did to it. Deleted a copy of the list? Deleted the contents …

Weeknotes for the week finishing Friday, 16th May 2025.

Annual leave!

For several reasons I found myself going to bed and waking up early. I started reading about Rust (it’s a programming language, dad) and working through the Getting Started section of The Book. I was impressed by the …

Weeknotes for the week finishing Friday, 9th May 2025.

After a hiatus, weeknotes are (hopefully) back. In the last six months, I’ve become a dad, taken a month off, and become a tech lead. Nevertheless, these are weeknotes. What happened this week?

Several things happened this week, but I …

Weeknotes for the week finishing Friday, 8th November 2024.

I wrote these on Monday, 11th November. I struggled to remember the previous week!

The REX (Researcher EXperience) team started a new initiative: “Onboarding OpenCodelists”. Lucy and Mary asked us to split into two squads. One squad will focus on maintaining …

Weeknotes for the week finishing Friday, 1st November 2024.

Annual leave!

We went to on holiday. Some walking, some paddleboarding, some running.

Weeknotes for the week finishing Friday, 18th October 2024.

I’m back after a two-week hiatus.

Katie and I have reduced the frequency of our meetings, which I think has helped each of us focus on our other tasks. We’re now meeting on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings for …

Weeknotes for the week finishing Friday, 27th September 2024.

This was my third full week as Katie’s buddy. We covered:

• When QuerySets are evaluated
• The nature of the SQL statements generated by Django’s ORM
• List comprehensions (listcomps)
• Breakpoints, the Python debugger, and pdb++
• Django Debug Toolbar
• Django …

Weeknotes for the week finishing Friday, 20th September 2024.

This was my second full week as Katie’s buddy. We covered:

• the Django shell (manage.py shell)
• the database shell (manage.py dbshell)
• displaying two shells in one window with Terminator
• creating and saving models with managers and instances
• environment …