The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Python

Andrew Brookins

andrewbrookins.com

The collected essays of Andrew Brookins, published from 2009 to the present.

PythonDatabasesDistributed systems / cloudEssays / personalDev tools / editors / IDEs

’10’15’20’25
Posts
76 from 13 Nov 2009 to 27 Jan 2026
Posting
now and then (1 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://andrewbrookins.com/feed.xml

2026 1

  1. The Collapse of Space

2024 1

  1. How to Ride a Bike in the Suburbs or Die Trying

2021 4

  1. High Availability, Replication, and Failover Explained with Stuffed Animals
  2. What is Python's Default Hash Algorithm?
  3. Poetry Is My Favorite Python Dependency Manager
  4. Rewriting an API to Use FastAPI: Benchmarks and Lessons Learned

2020 11

  1. Scaling Django with Postgres Read Replicas
  2. Building Implicit Interfaces in Python with Protocol Classes
  3. Why Does Python Have a len() Function?
  4. Recording Pro Audio and Video at Home with iPads and iPhones
  5. iPad Play Dates in the Time of Coronavirus
  6. Handoff from Vim over SSH to Working Copy on iPad
  7. Copying to the iOS Clipboard Over SSH with Control Codes
  8. Story: David Browning
  9. Story: Hunting Ghosts
  10. So You Want to Self-Publish a Technical Book
  11. Time Is a Circle: Apple Watch and the Geometry of Time

2019 6

  1. The Temple of Django Database Performance Is on Sale Now
  2. Coding on iPadOS: Browser Dev Tools with Inspect
  3. Will iOS 13 Add Support for Safari Extensions?
  4. Synchronizing the iOS Clipboard with a Remote Server Using Command-Line Tools
  5. Starting a Publishing Company: Month 1
  6. Coding on an iPad Pro in 2019

2018 5

  1. What Are We Doing Here?
  2. Using Windows 10 and the Surface Book 2 for Web Development
  3. Demonstrating Timeouts, Retries, and Circuit Breakers with an Outage Simulator
  4. Can you Write Code on a Chromebook?
  5. Mixins in Python and Ruby Compared

2017 5

  1. Ten Years of Learning Investments
  2. The Rule of Three
  3. Dear Alma: Do You Have to Achieve an Act of Greatness for Your Life to Matter?
  4. My Ideal Software Development Environment
  5. Can You Write Code on an iPad?

2016 1

  1. How Does Django's StreamingHttpResponse Work, Exactly?

2015 5

  1. Refactoring Search from Django App to Microservice
  2. Dear Alma: How to Quit Drinking
  3. Becoming a Better Learner
  4. Dear Alma: One Day Left to Live
  5. Protect Against Bias While Hiring

2014 7

  1. How to Thrive as a Remote Worker
  2. PyCharm: Open the Current File in Vim, Emacs or Sublime Text
  3. Video of My DjangoCon Talk: “The Evolution of a RESTful Django Backend”
  4. An Epic Review of PyCharm 3 from a Vim User's Perspective
  5. Porting a Geographic Nearest-Neighbor Python Web Service to Go
  6. Four Things I Learned about Software Engineering from Programming MUDs as a Teenager
  7. On Starting a Daily Meditation Practice

2013 4

  1. One Year Later: An Epic Review of PyCharm 2.7 from a Vim User's Perspective
  2. Reading List for an Apprentice Web Developer
  3. Wrap Comments and Text to Column Width in IntelliJ Editors
  4. Build an In-Memory Proximity Search Web Service with Python, SciPy and Heroku

2012 8

  1. Revisiting Umberto Eco's Future of the Book
  2. Using IPython Notebook with Django
  3. Set an ImageField path in Django manually
  4. Go: How to Get the Directory of the Current File
  5. Run Django Unit Tests in a Sublime Text 2 Build System
  6. Python: How to tell what class a decorated method is in at runtime
  7. Make Sublime Text 2 More like Vim: Wrap Code, Go To Last Edit, Jump Back, and More
  8. Sharp Edges: Protecting Ourselves from Digital Publishing

2011 4

  1. iA Writer and Notational Velocity
  2. How to Fix Slow Scrolling in Vim and MacVim on macOS
  3. Instant Django Dev Environments with Tmux, Tmuxinator, and Virtualenvwrapper
  4. Self-Reliant Veganism

2010 6

  1. No More Supermarket Blues
  2. Riding the Springwater Corridor
  3. This Time It’s War
  4. Sound Problems with Ubuntu
  5. No NIC on a Windows 7 VMWare image
  6. Deploying Fat Free CRM to Heroku

2009 8

  1. How to Extract Craigslist Locations with Nokogiri
  2. Coastal Bookstores
  3. Reading Murakami Five Years Later
  4. CiviCRM Views 2 integration with a remote CiviCRM database
  5. Linux: Remove all empty files from a directory
  6. Problems and Solutions to Problems: Views 2, CiviCRM, and Drupal 6
  7. Vim for Thunderbird: Muttator extension External Editor extension
  8. Even Better GNU Screen