Conrad Fox



Blog

  • Programming
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Coarse Programmer's guide to Python's stringy bits

Strings should be easy to understand. They're just text, right? In this article I go under the hood of Python's unicode strings, and find out why I keep getting UnicodeEncodeError.

  • Programming
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Coarse Programmer's guide to reactive UIs: Intercooler.js

I don't want a UI that feels like it's from 2003, but I really don't want to fiddle with a javascript framework. Intercooler.js offers a simple and somewhat coarse alternative.

  • writing
  • journalism
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Notes, quotes and socks

Do you feel like writing is hard? That your ideas never seem to shine on the paper like they did in your head? It's time to make writing mundane and mindless.

  • travel
  • Mexico
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The soul outside Merida's "artistic" center

On a torrid April midmorning, I stood with my kids in a thin sliver of shade cast by a building in Ciudad Caucel, a sprawling suburb on the western edge of Merida, Mexico. There were already several people pressed up against the building so I had to stand partly in ...

  • journalism

Writing for radio: a quote-based writing method

Writing is hard work. When preparing a radio script, I put off that hard work as long as I can, focusing on the quotes and scenes, and only starting to write at the very end of the job.

  • Programming
  • django
  • wagtail

Wagtail: replicating a database with fixtures

Replicating your development database on your production server isn't as easy as copy-paste. A bug in Wagtail makes it doubly difficult. Here's a step-by-step guide that worked for me.