A fun article for the end of the year, Mike Riley looks at the hardware innovations of 2021:
Mike also wrote a book this year about home automation projects using Python and Raspberry Pi. It’s one of those tech books that makes me think, yeah, I could actually do some of these projects.
Howdy Devtalkers!
I’m back to posting about what The Pragmatic Programmers are up to on Medium.
So that you know how it works, Medium lets you view five articles per month without a subscription.
Then you hit the paywall.
Ouch. 
If there is a particular PragPub article you’d like to see revived or a particular topic you’d like one of our book authors to write an article about, let me know and I will see what I can do!
Thanks for reading!
–Margaret
I’m creating a little post here that I can reply to with new posts about Medium articles.
Learning to ask for help is a valuable leadership skill. Join Johanna Rothman for her series of leadership tips on Medium:
Johanna is the author of a dozen books and counting. You can find all of her books on The Pragmatic Bookshelf website.
This article is just a sneak peek of our book sale that starts Sunday, December 12th:
Do programmers really write unit tests that test nothing? Sadly, yes. Tests that prove nothing have no benefit to your team. Removing them will make your coverage metrics honest and useful as Tim Ottinger and Jeff Langr wrote in Unit Tests Are FIRST from the archives of PragPub magazine in 2012:
Their unique book, Agile in a Flash, was published a year before, and contains tips for coaching agile team that are still useful today:
James Stanier has been giving us a steady stream of articles related to his wildly popular book, Become an Effective Engineering Manager. Here’s the last one in that series, appropriate to endings:
But endings are also beginnings for other things, and James has a new book in beta:
We hope to bring you articles related to remote work in the new year, so stay tuned.
It’s okay to fail–just learn something from it, and move on.
To brighten your Monday morning, Ken Kousen @kenkousen will be sharing his thoughts on failure. Look for the article starting December 13, 2021 at 6:30 AM.
“How to Deal With Failure” by Ken Kousen
Then Tuesday morning, check the Twelve Days of PragProg page for a flash sale (shhh, don’t let them know that I gave you the heads up).
Ken’s book is a must-have for the programmer on your list this season who needs a bit of advise for getting the most of the boss/employee relationship.
Google Colab is a computational notebook, which is a system that mixes code, text, and data in the same document. Using an interactive notebook, learn more about features and how to use Google Colab Notebooks from author Paolo Perrotta @nusco in this tutorial on Medium:
https://medium.com/pragmatic-programmers/google-colab-the-first-few-steps-ee1bdfee3415
Paolo’s book, Programming Machine Learning is available from The Pragmatic Bookshelf.
Step back to 2019 with this PragPub article from Erica Sadun:
https://medium.com/pragmatic-programmers/the-knee-jerk-else-clause-the-case-against-else-eca4835317d6
Her book, Swift Style, Second Edition, is available from the Pragmatic Bookshelf.
Give credit where due and praise people for their work as often as possible. You will enhance your reputation and gain loyalty and respect from your team. Author and speaker Johanna Rothman @jrothman shares leadership tips on Medium:
https://medium.com/pragmatic-programmers/give-credit-as-often-as-possible-401ce1d65ee7
You can find Johanna Rothman’s books on The Pragmatic Bookshelf website.
From the archives of PragPub magazine, April 2016, step into the world of cultural domain analysis (CDA)–the study of how people in groups think about lists of words that somehow go together and how this thinking differs between groups. Social scientists used to gather data for analysis using the pencil and paper approach. Thanks to computers and Python, social scientists can now automate tasks they used to do by hand. Using the Anaconda Python distribution, Dmitry Zinoviev shows you how to construct a Python script for analyzing cultural domains:
https://medium.com/pragmatic-programmers/analyzing-cultural-domains-with-python-f661aca2a8c1
Dmitry has published four books (and counting) with The Pragmatic Bookshelf:
Ricardo Gerardi gives us a helper function to calculate the relative difference between input numbers to help with testing floating-point numbers in Go in this article on Medium:
Ricardo’s book, Powerful Command-Line Applications in Go, was just released by The Pragmatic Bookshelf:
You wake up to 404 errors and missing content on your website. You were hacked.
To protect your website, make sure that your passwords are strong, that SSL is enabled, and that you have a good backup system where you keep those backups going back many months.
In this article from the April 2018 issue of PragPub, Erica Sadun gives us “In Which I Get Hacked: A Cautionary Tale”
https://medium.com/pragmatic-programmers/in-which-i-get-hacked-a-cautionary-tale-80cd02f9bead
Her book, Swift Style, Second Edition, is available from the Pragmatic Bookshelf.
For the holidays we are keeping things low-key. In fact, The Pragmatic Bookshelf offices are closed from December 24 through January 3rd. The next few posts are about books that have recently been released in beta or in print, plus a couple of articles from the PragPub archives. Look for the following upcoming articles.
December 23:
Build a Binary Clock with Elixir and Nerves
December 24:
December 27:
Powerful Command-Line Applications in Go
December 28:
Choice Bits Overheard on the Intertubes
December 29:
December 30:
December 31:
Hope you and everyone at PragProg have a great holiday and happy, healthy and prosperous 2022 Margaret 
In our first Medium post of the new year, Mike Riley makes some predictions for 2022:
You can pick up Mike’s book, Portable Python Projects from The Pragmatic Bookshelf:
Is it time for a New Year’s resolution for the workplace? Maybe so.
Here’s a sneak peek for January 4th. Johanna Rothman cautions us to be wary of being the person who brings birthday cakes and schedules farewell lunches. Those non-promotable tasks do little to advance your career, and mostly no one notices when you stop doing them.
Read more on Medium.
Johanna’s books are available from The Pragmatic Bookshelf.
In the Futurama episode “Godfellas,” God tells Bender, “When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.” How do you, as a program manager, know when you’re doing your job well? Author Ben Cotton tells us in this article:
You want to know the answer to this question whether you’re a professional program manager or a volunteer in an open source community filling that role.
Ben @bcotton has a new book now in beta from The Pragmatic Bookshelf:
@michaelswaine Mike Swaine is writing a monthly column for our Medium publication this year in which he explores our technology past. The first article is about Bill Gates as a teenaged hacker:
This article is worth spending one of your five free monthly reads on–it’s a fascinating story and gives you some insight into what is happening these days with security breaches.
Mike’s book with co-author Paul Freiberger is chock-full of such stories:
