Screen Scraping with Beautiful Soup
Beautiful Soup is a Python library which is very handy for projects like screen-scraping. Here’s a brief tutorial on how to scrape a list of the top 250 movies from IMBD.com and write them to a local text file: 1) Download Beautiful Soup Downloading Beautiful Soup is very easy. I’m currently using version 3 and […]
How To Reverse A String in Python
Unlike other languages such as Ruby, there is no built-in method to reverse a string in Python. Here are two possible ways to accomplish that: 1) The 'Long' Way This approach uses a for-loop with the join method to reverse a string: def rev(s): return ”.join([s[i] for i in range(len(s)-1,-1,-1)]) >>> print rev(“abcde”) edcba 2) […]
Learn Python the Hard Way
Over the last two years, I've spent considerable time learning several programming languages (PHP, C# and Ruby). I started developing web applications with PHP, moved onto ASP.NET MVC using C# and then decided to experiment with Ruby on Rails. I really loved the simplicity of Ruby and the 'magic' of Rails, but there was something […]
What Do Microsoft Program Managers Do?
For most of my 10+ year’s career at Microsoft, I’ve been in program management roles — from being a program manager responsible for a specific product feature to becoming a group program manager leading a team of program managers. It’s a role that I really enjoy doing and over the years I have learned a […]