This post ended up including stuff from both this most recent week and the one previous, as I missed last week. However, I had a good reason: I started a short term business analyst contract. There’s been a fair bit more travel lately given that the position it in San Antonio, and with a family trip this week for Thanksgiving, I’ll likely hold off on a follow up post until two weeks from now.

New bits

Python divmod

No more // and %, divmod returns both parts together. One of these days I need to look through the built in functions list on the Python documentation page fully. There always seems to be something I’ve either forgotten or could have used two weeks ago.

return divmod(90, 60)

(1, 30)

TypeScript scripting in Excel

I’ve had a little more cause than normal to work with Excel in the past week thanks to the new job. Poking around I was surpised to see that Excel has built in support for using TypeScript to accomplish much of the same things you might use VBA for. I don’t have a lot of experience with JavaScript or TypeScript, but I like the idea of being able to learn something more generally appllicable than VBA and still get things done in Excel.

Follow Ups

Org mode blog writing

I’m finally writing blog posts in org mode from the start of the week. Still quite a bit of a learning curve, but gradually getting the hang of it. Things I’m enjoying:

• Easier list generation
• Todo and heading control
• Editing with formating in a similar level of control to markdown, but with formatting displayed. I know there are markdown extensions that can do this, but again this just part of the mode.

Of course there’s a lot more here, but already this is a bit nicer than just editing a markdown file in a fairly barebones vim setup like I have been before.

Ale linting

Most of my problems with this from last week came from trying to only setup ruff. I was also trying to do this in vanilla vim, but neovim seems to be ale’s preferred target and therefore required less configuration. Installing black and pylint (even with pipx!) and adding them to the approved linter list gave me linting in neovim with pretty much no effort. I’d still like to get ruff going. Most likely this is a ruff check versus ruff format issue. Ale will allow you to set options for linters and fixers, but I’m not sure how to do this for the same package depending on what it’s being used for at the time. Of course this also might just be a completely different issue I’ve missed or some other basic setup fix, but I need to play around with it a bit more.

For Next Time

I don’t have definite ideas for next time, though writing a blog post generally seems to help me learn more orgmode stuff at this point. As always please let me know if you have any suggestion or corrections. Thanks for reading!