A common pattern of using pipenv in containers is to install as follows:

COPY Pipfile Pipfile.lock ./
RUN pip install --upgrade pip && \
    pip install pipenv && \
    pipenv install --system --deploy --ignore-pipfile && \
    pipenv --clear

What is going on here, exactly? How does one understand the intersection of the flags given to pipenv …

I often write documentation with reStructuredText and Sphinx. Sometimes I want to refer to the plural of some programming concept, where the concept is monospace font but the plural form is in the normal font, e.g. lists.

While this is easy to do in markdown:

`list`s

It …

For a while I've tolerated files named Icon? that appear in my console ls and git status output on macOS as well as in some IDE file trees like in Atom:

$ \ls -Al
total 696
-rw-------  1 micahsmith  staff  179 Nov 12  2019 Experiment Datasets.gsheet
-rw-r--r--@ 1 micahsmith  staff …

One common Python gotcha is the use of mutable objects as defaults for function keyword arguments. There are approximately one billion questions on SO about this or nice discussions elsewhere. I came across a nice feature in Python's dataclasses library that addresses a similar problem.

Mutable defaults are bad

As …

[Update from 2020-03-27 below]

Vim's diff mode is a lightweight diffing tool that can be used at the command line, in particular with the git diff command. In a previous post, I wrote about configuring vimdiff as the git difftool for use with Matlab development (yes, way back when I …

How to find ports that are already "in use" on macOS:

sudo lsof -P -i TCP -s TCP:LISTEN

This is helpful if you are trying to figure out which process is using a port so that you can kill that process — for example, if you have a web server …

How to trim a figure in LaTeX.

You've already inserted the figure into a figure environment and now want to trim excess whitespace.

Start adjusting from here:

\fbox{\includegraphics[clip=true, trim={0 0 0 0}, width=\linewidth]{myfigure}}

fbox is a black box around the float content so you …

Using the autoreload extension.

%load_ext autoreload
%aimport mymodule
%autoreload 1

The autoreload command understands three levels:

• 0 -> extension is disabled
• 1 -> reload modules that were marked with %aimport
• 2 -> reload everything

The easiest usage of autoreload is to not aimport anything and set %autoreload 2, which causes the extension to …

Sometimes a dumb technical approach can be a solution to a real world problem.

I live in a graduate residence that doesn't have a buzzer system. To be granted access, my guests have to text/call me directly and I have to walk downstairs to let them in. Though this …

I'm bailing on Julia for machine learning — just for my one class, that is. Don't worry ~too much~!

I'm taking graduate machine learning (6.867) this semester at MIT. There are three homework assignments in the course that are structured as mini-projects, in which students implement canonical algorithms from scratch …

I've been loving vimdiff as my git difftool for a while.

Vimdiff and Matlab packages

Vimdiff runs into some problems when working with Matlab code. Matlab considers directories with names beginning with + as "packages", a natural way to organize projects. However, this means that many paths relative to the git …