My client is looking to hire a new Python developer, initially for an 8 month contract. It's a home working position, we communicate mostly via Skype / email / gtalk etc. Although we do meet up in meatspace from time to time, so ideally a candidate would be in the London / Oxford area.

You will be working with your truly. The projects I've been working on are in the server side of web-enabled devices. The web interface is written in Django, so you'll need the usual battery of front-end technologies; HTML, CSS, Javascript etc. We have a Twistd server which communicates with devices in the field, that my client produces. In the middle we have dynamic user interface generation from XML. continue reading…

Here's a Python gotcha that I spent some time tracking down. I'm writing it up in the spirit of saving developers a debugging headache in the future.

I had an integer with a single bit set, and I wanted to find the index of that bit. For example, 4 in binary is 00000100. The 1 is at the third position from the right, which should give an index of 2 – since the first position is 0.

You can do this in two ways; either check each bit in turn until you find a 1, or you can use math as a shortcut. I chose the math solution:

Simple right? Finally staying awake in high school maths paid off. So simple that it was the last bit of code I suspected to be broken (spoiler: it was). continue reading…