Git config I like to have a global git config which takes care of my usual git setup like typical commands and abbreviations I use, my username and my email address. It can be helpful to adjust some of this information for a local project, e.g. when you are normally having your regular email address setup, but in one of the local folders you develop for a company you work for and you want to have your work email address instead.

Bash string manipulation When I write bash scripts in my terminal, I often need to manipulate strings. Unfortunately, I often forget how to do this properly in bash, so I thought I’d write a blog article for me to remember better in the future. Hopefully it will be helpful for some of you developers out there as well. String manipulation in bash is not hard, but I find some of the notation a bit cumbersome especially when normally working more with Python or other languages.

Recently Swift for Tensorflow has picked up some steam, so I wanted to explore the Swift programming language a bit. The main advantage over Python for Swift is that Swift is very fast by directly using the LLVM compiler infrastructure. Python itself relies a lot on C to make code run fast, but if you write Python code you can get very slow code if it’s not optimized. However, the main disadvantage for Swift is that it’s ecosystem when it comes to machine learning and data processing libraries is currently a lot less powerful than Python’s ecosystem.

When you are prototyping and developing small scripts that you keep running, it might be annoying that they quit when an error occurs. If you want very basic robustness against these crashes, you can at least use a bash script to automatically restart your script on error. The tool to use here is called until and makes this a breeze. Let’s use a dumb example Python script called test.py: import time while True: print('Looping') time.

Python is a great language to build command-line tools in as it’s very expressive and concise. You want to have the ability to parse arguments in your scripts as you don’t want to hard-code the relevant variable values to make the tool useful. So how do we go about this in Python? It’s easily done using the argparse module. With argparse, you define the different arguments which you expect, their default values and their shortcuts to call them.