Posts by Michael Washburn Jr

Author Bio

Picture of Michael Washburn Jr

Hi, I'm Mike. I'm a full-stack software engineer with a passion for web app development and technical leadership. I'm currently working as a Tech Lead at HubSpot. In my free time I like to hike, camp, and brew beer.


Posts

outstretched hand with water in the background, Narrowing Your Focus: The Key to Being a Successful Developer
November 7, 2017

Narrowing Your Focus: The Key to Being a Successful Developer?

I’ve recently come to the realization that I can’t work towards all my goals and achieve the progress that I need. When you’re actively trying to make progress on too many goals, it makes it harder to get to your milestones. You’re spread too thin. When you can’t complete milestones, you quickly lose the drive to work on anything. Before long, you’ll give up. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

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September 26, 2017

5 Tips for Writing Better Python

I’ve been writing Python for some time now, and when I reflect on some of the older code I’ve written… I sometimes cringe. For example, when I was just starting out, I wrote this Sudoku game in python (available on GitHub here). I thought that this was one of my better pieces of work at the time. It turns out I can’t even clone and run this because I didn’t add a setup.py or requirements.txt file, a mistake I would never make today!

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Why You Shouldn’t Import Functions and Classes Directly in Python

Why You Shouldn’t Import Functions and Classes Directly in Python

Today I was doing some programming, trying to finish up an old project that was 80% done, but I never finished. The project is an API for sharing beer ingredient data, being the avid homebrewer that I am. I was in the middle of writing some pretty simple authentication logic, when I found a weird bug in my code. The code, featured below, was pretty straightforward, or so I thought.

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