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 …

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 …

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 …