Forem: Kostas Sar

Code price-tag

Kostas Sar — Sun, 02 Sep 2018 23:38:00 +0000

How much should a dev charge his client for a project?

First things that come to mind are questions like:

How big is the project?
How long will it take?
Can one person complete it alone or there is a need for a team?
What infrastructure is needed?

and many many more.

So recently I was asked to take on a small project.

This person found out I am a programmer and asked if I would be able to develop an automation process he had in mind. I was happy to hear that he had a clear end-product in mind so there will be much less confusion during the development process.

The immediate next question was about the cost.

I am not going to go into details about the project because I want your answers to be general and not case specific.

Having never sold my own code / product I have no idea on how cost is estimated. The interwebs, sadly, do not provide a clear formula and everyone gives vague directions.

I know lines of code or time spent working on the project are not valid options but maybe they could be taken into account.

The big Questions

How do you not get underpaid for your working hours?
How do you not get overpaid at the expence of your customer?
How do you personally calculate cost and agree on a price?

Python 2 VS Python 3

Kostas Sar — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 06:34:29 +0000

This time we visit the topic "Should I use Python 3 as it is the latest version or should I stick to Python 2 because most of the internet says so?"

Disclaimer: I am quite Python 3 sided and looking for more of its drawbacks, so feel free to disagree with anything.

Key Differences from Python 2 to Python 3

Syntactical, best shown by the print function.
Division with integers now outputs decimals if needed
Unicode as default character encoding

And with the technical stuff out of the way, let's see what divides the community.

Libraries

The main pro Python 2 argument is that every library ever is written for it and if one switches to Python 3 won't be able to find and use any of them. I believe this argument is quite outdated as Python 3 is now 10 years old and many libraries are now updated and functional. Some teams even start a project and in case the needed library is missing they code it, document and upload it. Very kind of them, isn't it?
Right now the only libs you can't find are the really obscure and unpopular ones. But if you are lucky one of the teams mentioned above will stumble on them and make it available to the rest of us!

Dev Support

Python 2.7 is no longer under development and in 2020 will even be discontinued. In contrary Python 3 will have new features, active support and stable releases.

Reasons to stick with Python 2

The only reason I thought was not outdated about sticking with Python 2 is the following.
One might be in a large company and all the code is written in Py2. Refactoring to Py3 will not only halt the development but also cost money as the engineers tampering with the code must get paid.

As quoted by the Python team:
"Python 2.x is legacy, Python 3.x is the present and future of the language."

What is your opinion on the matter?

Books vs Online Courses

Kostas Sar — Tue, 26 Jun 2018 07:06:40 +0000

I'm about to start a project on data mining and statistics and the recommended tools are Python and R. As I have never before used R I want to learn about the language before tampering with any of the project code. Also the main structure is already made by someone else and I was asked to add more features.

So that's when this question came to me. Should I get a couple of books on the topic? Am I going to be fine after taking an online course (free or paid) plus some tests and exercises in hackerrank for example? Or do these methods compliment each other so it's best to do both?

What is your opinion? How do you usually get started with programming languages and new concepts?

P.S: If you have any good recommendations on where to start with R it would be much appreciated! But the main topic of the post is still the comparison of the two methods.

Thank you!