DEV Community: Jariullah Safi

fzf and autojump: shell superpowers

Jariullah Safi — Thu, 09 Jan 2020 18:15:41 +0000

I've been using fzf (fuzzy file finder) and autojump (smart cd command) for a long time now and wanted to share how they are used. You can check out the demonstration here.

Teaching myself Julia

Jariullah Safi — Tue, 07 Jan 2020 07:04:40 +0000

I recently took it upon myself to record myself learning Julia for the first time (an edited down version of that can be found here) to demonstrate to others how to learn a new language. It was a really cool experience and I got to satisfy my curiosity about this new contender for the Python throne.

The game plan was:

Learn Basic Syntax
Lists, dicts, tuples
Control flow, functions, structs
Notebooks and visualization
Package management
Reimplement a simulation from my Numba video and compare performance

The first half of this I could meet by going over the "Learn X in Y" page for Julia. The rest came from the official docs which are really nicely put together.

Overall I came away mostly impressed by Julia. There's some rough edges in the tooling still and some syntax and design choices are hard to stomach (1 based indexing guys? Really?) but these are mostly minor. I've gotten a number of very insightful comments on the video too about ways the language allows you to overcome these issues if you wanted to. I was particularly delighted by the package management. It seems to take in the best parts of pip, npm, and cargo and I loved using it.

Overall it's nice to see a modern language that's simple but has a focus on performance. I look forward to seeing where it goes next and if I can ever professionally jump into it.

Have you used Julia? What are your impressions (especially if you're from a Python background)?

Numba Introduction Video

Jariullah Safi — Sun, 29 Dec 2019 08:03:27 +0000

Published a tutorial covering the most important basics of using Numba. You can find it here: https://youtu.be/x58W9A2lnQc

Hope it's useful to someone :)

pybind11-cmake: Straightforward boilerplate generation for pybind11 + cmake

Jariullah Safi — Tue, 06 Aug 2019 16:52:49 +0000

pybind11 is great for making python wrappers of C++ code and I use it all the time. In most cases I need to work with a cmake file so I start the project off using their cmake example. This usually involves copying the CMakeExtension / Builder class to my setup.py file and adding pybind11 to my project as a git submodule. I could do without cmake in simpler projects as shown in the python_example but I find it difficult to use for more complicated projects.

So I made a boilerplate generator (https://github.com/safijari/pybind11-cmake) that also encapsulates the extension module and provides a script to generate all the files you would need to get started with a project. This allows you to work on a pybind11 project purely in a virtualenv using cmake (no need to make a git submodule).

I've already simplified my existing projects with this and hope it is useful to others as well.

Refactoring in Spacemacs using iedit and helm edit

Jariullah Safi — Thu, 16 May 2019 08:42:22 +0000

I recently released a video detailing the frankly absurdly powerful refactoring tools in Spacemacs: iedit and helm edit. Check it out, and let me know what videos you'd like to see next :).

Org mode with Spacemacs

Jariullah Safi — Sat, 04 May 2019 21:18:47 +0000

I recently started making videos about Spacemacs and my most recent one is about using org mode. You can find it here.

I'm looking for general feedback as well as suggestions. Current plan is to keep making videos in this style for a number of spacemacs topics as well as for other productivity boosting tools like i3, zsh, etc. Hope you all like it :)