TaB: Stewardship, endianness, and shadowing in Python
Hello and happy Friday! There are four blog posts for you this month. I hope you enjoy them!
Blog updates
- Stewardship over ownership: Code ownership is a pervasive concept in our industry, but we'd be better served by embracing the concept of stewardship, instead.
- Who are your teammates?: If you manage a team, who are your teammates? If you're a staff software engineer, who are your teammates? It's not who you lead and manage, it's your peer leaders. Taking this perspective ultimately leads to better outcomes for your team and your organization.
- Big endian and little endian: This post came from my difficulty remembering which endianness is which, so now I have an explainer when I forget—and so do you! I wrote the notes for this post over a year ago while directing a chess tournament. Since then, it's served as my muse: whenever I sat to write it, I wrote something else instead. But it's finally here!
- Shadowing in Python surprised me with an UnboundLocalError: This is one of those Python things that I always forget until I run into it. It threw me and a coworker off while debugging—it looks like the variable is defined, why does Python insist it's unbound?
Making music
I've gotten back into music recently. I played woodwinds in school (clarinet and saxophone), and mostly stopped playing after college. But when I got sick last year, playing a wind instrument was the only thing that could bring my heart rate back down sometimes. And in our current environment, it's the only thing that can calm me down sometimes.
My main instrument is a wind synth, but I'm also playing some other woodwinds, keys, and drums. And I've started writing some music! My first track is up, and I'd be honored if you take a couple of minutes to listen to it.
I hope you have a great month!
❤️ Nicole
Don't miss what's next. Subscribe to Technically a Blog Digest: