Dealing with Bad Memory

The family joke is that I was born senile (my joke is that I have 1bit memory). During the years I've developed some methods to help me be be productive with bad memory. Hope they'll help you as well (if you remember them :).

JFDI
That's the most effective method - do it at the moment you remember. It's pretty amazing how many things you can do "right now" without interrupting your flow too much. Once you did it - there's no need to remember.

Make it Impossible to Forget
Yeah, writing things down help - but I forget to look at my lists. However if you make things impossible to forget - then you won't forget. For example if I need to take something to the car, I'll place it at the front door - can't miss it when I go out.

Get Help
May they be electronic or human, get some help. I married a wife with a phenomonal memory, but it's not an option for everyone :) In this digital age you can find a good non human assistent to help you. Hiring a human assitenet doesn't have to be expensive - see Fancy Hands for example. 

Write It Down
We have a saying: "A short pencil is better than a long memory.". Write things down, it'll help you remember when you write then and later you can look them up. I use this blog as an memory of things that worked for me. Other things I use are pinboard, trello, GMail and Google Docs. Everything with a search function in it.
 
Forgive Yourself
You will forget things, learn to live with it. One of the worst things you can do it agonize over the things you forgot. It'll only add stress to your life without helping you to remember.  

Removing "noise" before matplotlib charts in IPython notebooks

By default, IPython notebook prints the value of the last expression. This works fine most of the time but sometimes the result of a chart is a long list of lines which is something you don't want to see - you just want to see the chart. Here are two options to fix this (you can also view the example notebook).

Decorators and Context Managers Workshop

I gave a workshop on decorators and context mangers at work.

Both are very powerful and will change the way you code in Python once you grok them. They mostly allow you to focus on application logic and write the "book keeping" code (logging, timing, resource allocation ...) in a separate place.

Here are the IPython notebooks:

• Context Managers
• Decorators

And the solutions (but try to solve the exercises first):

• Context Managers
• Decorators

 If you want to run locally, the code is here.

Searching and Viewing emoji

We started using emoji at work. We're using Adium with the emoji xtra.

Here's a little script to search and optionally show emojis (requires matplotlib).