Counting Words with Python

Posted by Jack McKew on Thu 19 March 2020 in Python • Tagged with python • 5 min read

Recursively counting words in markdown within a folder

In the last 55 posts, I've written 34846 words in this blog. In comparison, my engineering thesis for graduating university was 9916 words across 69 pages.

A question had popped into my mind this week, "How many words have I written in …


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Python Bytes Awesome Package List

Posted by Jack McKew on Wed 11 March 2020 in Python • Tagged with python • 6 min read

Python Bytes is a weekly, short & sweet podcast by Michael Kennedy & Brian Okken. After having the podcast recommended numerous times by friends & colleagues, I decided to download every episode thus far on the 14th of September 2019. Over the next 174 days, whenever I was commuting, I'd listen to 171 …


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3D Gradient Descent in Python

Posted by Jack McKew on Wed 26 February 2020 in Python • Tagged with python, visualisation, generative • 40 min read

Visualising gradient descent in 3 dimensions

Building upon our terrain generator from the blog post: https://jackmckew.dev/3d-terrain-in-python.html, today we will implement a demonstration of how gradient descent behaves in 3 dimensions and produce an interactive visualisation similar to the terrain visualisation. Note that my understanding of gradient …


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Getting Started in Python

Posted by Jack McKew on Thu 20 February 2020 in Python • Tagged with python • 4 min read

Resources & tips for getting started in Python

Glossary

One of the most useful skills in my opinion in all walks of life is the ability to find information & answers. A very useful tool for doing this is the internet & search engines like Google. In my opinion being able to search …


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Automatically Generate Documentation with Sphinx

Posted by Jack McKew on Mon 03 February 2020 in Python • Tagged with python • 5 min read

Document code automatically through docstrings with Sphinx

This post goes into how to generate documentation for your python projects automatically with Sphinx!

First off we have to install sphinx into our virtual environment. Pending on your flavour, we can do any of the following

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pip install sphinx …

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3D Terrain in Python

Posted by Jack McKew on Fri 24 January 2020 in Python • Tagged with python, visualisation, generative • 21 min read

Generating & Visualising 3D Terrains in Python

Today, let's put together a 3D visualisation of randomly generated 'terrain' with Python. Data visualisation is an absolutely key skill in any developers pocket, as communicating both data, analysis and more is thoroughly simplified through the use of graphs. While a picture tells a …


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Intro To GeoPandas

Posted by Jack McKew on Wed 15 January 2020 in Python • Tagged with python, visualisation • 6 min read

Pandas for geospatial data

Personally whenever I am faced with a problem that involves analysing geospatial data, GeoPandas is the first tool/package I reach for. Extending on the Pandas dataframe data structure, GeoPandas brings functionality for working with points, polygons and more out of the box. This post is …


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Migrating from Wordpress to Pelican

Posted by Jack McKew on Fri 20 December 2019 in Software Development • Tagged with python • 5 min read

For some time now I have been wanting to move away from Wordpress, due to my specific case of wanting to embed custom HTML and JavaScript code snippets to enable interactive data visualisation. Furthermore my previous workflow of posts was disjointed in which I would develop the code in a …


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Making Executable GUIs with Python, Gooey & Pyinstaller

Posted by Jack McKew on Fri 01 November 2019 in Python • Tagged with python • 4 min read

Today we will go through how to go from a python script to packaged executable with a guided user interface (GUI) for users. First off we still start by writing the scripts that we would like to share with others to be able to use, especially for users that may …


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Intro to Games in Python with Pyglet

Posted by Jack McKew on Fri 04 October 2019 in Python • Tagged with python, pyglet • 3 min read

Recently, I've been researching ways that I could run a 2D simulation (and hopefully 3D) with many moving pieces and there was a desire to make it interactive as well. I stumbled through many visualisation frameworks such as:

Eventually, through the motivation of …


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