true confessions

of degenerate debugging

In my head, I know good techniques for debugging, but time after time, my heart leads me astray.

I know:

1. isolate the bug to the simplest test case I can find
2. when doing something new, make minor and incremental changes
3. step through my code slowly

and most importantly:

don't just flail around making random changes based on my random hypotheses about what the problem is

But for some reason, I always think "this time is different". I know what my mistake must be, and I'll just change it and re-run. No, that's not it, let me change something else. I can make big changes to my algorithm at the same time I massively scale up and change the input source.

These are all lies.

Getting started

if you are reading this, then I have succeeded

The first step to starting a blog was choosing a platform. I was pretty sure I wanted to use ipython notebook, having found some recent inspiration from Brian Granger's Strata Talk and Cam Davidson-Pilon's Bayesian Methods for Hackers book (neither of these are blogs, but they are both awesome).

But ipython notebook is not a platform. Google revealed a few options:

• Use nbconvert to convert ipynb to html and then put on blogger
• Nikola static site generator and put on GitHub Pages

I tried them both: http://datarachel.blogspot.com/ and http://racheltho.github.io/ (although you can probably guess which won if you are on this site).

On getting set up

For blogger: I had been using the dev version of ipython, and nbconvert doesn't seem to work properly there. Once I realized the problem, I installed version 1.0 and everything was fine. I copied and pasted the html manually into the input box provided by blogger, which seemed a bit clunky (couldn't find a direct upload, but maybe it's out there??)

For Nikola/gh-pages: Nikola was pretty simple to set up, but I was initially confused about what went in my racheltho.github.io repo. I eventually discovered that I wanted to push my output/ folder (created by Nikola) and this seemed to work well.

My thoughts

The Nikola pages definitely have a much cleaner look and better layout. To be fair, I didn't try different themes for either, but I am pleased with how much Nikola provides automatically. I also like the interface with GitHub Pages. Since I already use git regularly and like the version control it provides, this was another bonus. The Nikola handbook offers a compelling argument for the benefits of static pages. All in all, the choice was straightforward.