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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Introduction to Pytest & Pipenv

Posted by Jack McKew on Fri 20 September 2019 in Python • Tagged with python, pytest, pipenv • 2 min read

Unit tests in general are good practice within software development, they are typically automated tests written to ensure that a function or section of a program (a.k.a the 'unit') meets its design and behaves as intended.

This post won't go into testing structures for complex applications, but rather …


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Inheritance in Python

Posted by Jack McKew on Fri 13 September 2019 in Python • Tagged with python • 2 min read

As Python is a high level, general purpose programming language, which supports users to define their own types using classes, which are most often following the concept of object-oriented programming. Object-oriented programming is a type of software design in which users not only define the data type (eg, int) of …


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Dunders in Python

Posted by Jack McKew on Fri 06 September 2019 in Python • Tagged with python • 3 min read

A 'dunder' (double underscores) in Python (also known as a magic method) are the functions within classes having two prefix and suffix underscores in the function name. These are normally used for operator overloading (eg, __init__, __add__, __len__, __repr__, etc). For this post we will build a customized class for …


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Python Project Workflow

Posted by Jack McKew on Fri 30 August 2019 in Python • Tagged with python • 5 min read

This post will go through my personal preference on project structure and workflow for creating a new project and an insight how I work on my projects from a development point of view. I will go from the very start as if I did not have Python/Git installed on …


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Intro to Web Scraping

Posted by Jack McKew on Fri 23 August 2019 in Python • Tagged with python • 4 min read

Following on from last weeks post where we analysed the amount of repeated letters within current New Zealand town names. There was still one part of that analysis that really bugged me, and if you noticed it was from the data set that was used was using the European town …


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