This week we welcome Tommy Falgout (@lastcoolname) as our PyDev of the Week! Tommy works on the Robo-Clippy project. You can see what else he is up to by checking out his website. Let’s take a few moments to get to know Tommy better!

Can you tell us a little about yourself (hobbies, education, etc):

I grew up in the bayous of Louisiana, and while everyone else was interested in 4-wheeling and hunting, I gravitated towards computers and spent hours on my Commodore 64. Early on, I knew what it meant to be an outcast.

As I matured, my hobbies became numerous and varied, but all focused around my passion of building. For 5 years hosted and competed in Dallas/Fort Worth’s annual trebuchet competition: Slingfest, and was even featured on an episode of Dude Perfect on Nickelodeon as a Trebuchet expert (complete with my own IMDB page!). I also volunteer at a local Makerspace in Plano, TX (TheLab.ms), built a LEGO Robotic Clippy and competed in the Red Bull Soapbox Derby race. After a few exciting near-misses from bodily harm, I’ve settled down and recently taken up crochet and hobby electronics.

One of fields where WKMC algorithm can be applied is demographics. Imagine a situation, in which you would like to see how people group or would group if all administation divisions or historical conflicts disappeared or ethnical, national or tribal identity would not matter? How would then people go about creating communities?

I am doing a series of videos (spanish only!) about "modern Python", showing the modern replacements for things that are ... dense in their original forms.

So, I showed Poetry as an alternative to writing your setup.py and Click as a way to do things easier than argparse, and Pathlib instead of os.path and then I wanted to show Enums. Which are not so new since they have been there since Python 3.4 but I feel they are not used widely enough.

And then I noticed that they help do a "safer" version of the classical Python version of C's switch / case where you can be sure of not leaving any values unhandled.

Software developers should understand the basics of finance not only to manage their own money but also to understand how businesses' software projects are funded.

Understanding how other people who work in accounting, finance and project management think about business and finance in particular can help you make better architectural decisions when trying to build maintainable systems. Code is only one aspect of a large software project so working with others and viewing the world through their discipline will help you immensely as you advance your career.

In Python, there has only an object data type for all global variables. No matter that is a string or number, a python programmer does not need to declare the data type of that variable before using it because each variable in Python is an object variable.

If you are in web development, maybe you've heard of Sass, Less, Pug, Stylus etc. All these are pre-processors. In this tutorial we're going to build nothing less than a functional css pre-processor from scratch with variables and functions. This type of new language is called source-to-source compiled. If you are thrilled, i hope not to disappoint you.