Adimian

The FOSDEM 2021 Call for Participation is now live

We are happy to announce that we will be running a Python devroom again at FOSDEM 2021. As for many events, this year’s edition will be converted into an online edition, and take place on the 6th and 7th of February, with the Python devroom being available on Sunday

Personal

Don't be like Dr.Who

IntroductionWe all want to be nice. Well, at least I want to. I only have respect and esteem for my colleagues at Adimian, and they are all very dear to me personally. As a manager, I want them to have a happy life, be free from sorrow and stress, so

Personal

Is burnout sustainable?

After being diagnosed with six generalised infections in a row over the last six months, my doctor has become less and less subtle over the fact that I was basically working myself to death. The biggest irony is that our motto at Adimian is "sustainable development". How did I miss

Technical

Fast xlsx parsing with Python

So you have tried all the tools and libraries, but extracting data from giant Excel sheets is still too slow ? On the menu for this blog post we have: Quick dive into the structure of XLSX files The lxml library and the XSLT transformation How to use XSLT to parse

Technical

So you want to be a (Python) Developer

Since computers are all around us those days and many of us grew with them, it's quite tempting at some point in one's life to think "what if I wrote a smartphone app?" or "I could re-write this software so much better". And you would be

Technical

VPN party: chaining WireGuard and OpenVPN

This morning when I woke up, it was to the sound of my monitoring system notifications. We have a pretty simple setup: web servers connect to the vpn server vpn server connects to the internal servers web and vpn are hosted for our customer by a cloud provider internal servers

Technical

Securing Celery and Redis without SSL

Recently we wanted to deploy a bunch of Celery workers and connect them using a Redis backend for tasks scheduling and result storage. Since the workers and Redis would be internet-facing, we wanted to make sure it was not leaking any data, so we made a few tests. Securing the

Jupyter Notebooks for teaching Python

I have been recently busy creating materials for teaching / learning Python. The motivation for creating such materials is both in the trainings we host at Adimian and also in the personal need for having some interesting home project constantly going on. The technology choice for the materials was obvious from

Technical

Launching our YouTube channel

I have been teaching programming since 2010, and one of the most delicate topics remains the integration of test driven development in your daily practice. Every time I explain how to change habits to include TDD, students seem to be enthusiastic, but when I check a few weeks later, none

Company

Applying at Adimian: recruiter edition

Wait, why did I chose the word "recruiter" in the title? On one hand, I want you to know that I’m not a recruiter, or I don’t consider myself to be one at least. On the other hand I do have the responsibility to interview potential

Personal

Thug Memes everywhere!

In my previous post I discussed the benefits of investing time in personal project. As a continuum, I’ll present one of my latest personal projects in this post. In addition to presenting the details, I’ll list benefits I gained while hacking around the project. At the beginning of

Personal

Ethics in the workplace

This is a presentation that I gave at the first edition of FOSDEMx, at the University of Brussels on May, 3rd 2018. It is a collection of tips and heads-up on what I wish I knew when I was still a student myself, before I started working in IT. For

Technical

Optimizing Python

This is a presentation that I gave at the first edition of FOSDEMx, at the University of Brussels on May, 3rd 2018. The intent is to scratch the surface of what it takes to do CPU performance optimization in Python, and give students a few first tools to get started.

Technical

Install an NSX Edge (and a logical router)

So, you want to be the guy who installs an NSX Edge for the first time and does not spend a whole week (or more) to do it? Here are some tips to make the installation easier. Version Note: for ESXi 6.0 and higher Getting started You’ll have

Personal

You should spend more time on personal projects

The purpose of this blog post is to convince you to devote more time for your personal projects or to start a fresh project if you don’t have one yet. The motivation for writing this is that work-related projects usually have a set of attributes that are shared between

Company

We went to EuroPython 2017

This year Adimian was Gold sponsor of the EuroPython in Rimini. Why sponsoring the event you will ask ? Turns out we have been building a business on the shoulders of the great Python community, so it seemed normal to give back at some point. So in early July, we packed

Personal

To know where to stop

This is the kind of horror story that happens now and then. It's a story where pride and arrogance will lead you into a pit of despair. This is the story of the time I tried to modify an LDAP schema inside a Docker container. It's not really about the

Company

Working at Adimian

So you're wondering how it is to work at Adimian? Follow me! We are a small consulting company operating between France and Belgium, and we are specialists in both Python and scientific computing. Our customers are mainly large companies / groups who are looking for our expertise for building new projects

Technical

The rise of Data Science

The shape of things to come In the past few months, I think we've witnessed the end of the "Big Data" hype, and the rise of the "Data Science". To me, this is the natural transition from buzzword to useful technology. I'm really thrilled to see

Technical

Debugging code within Docker container

Docker everywhere At Adimian, Docker really changed the way we deploy applications. We've been playing with it since the beta, and using it in production since version 1.0. By the end of 2015, we plan to have converted all our deployments using containers, migrating applications to Docker if they

Technical

Enabling graphs on your shinken monitor

If you've set up a shinken monitor, you'll probably be a bit disappointed that the graph feature is not included, and that setting it up isn't all that easy. Luckily, this guide will show you how to do this, fairly easy. The first thing to know is that you'll be

Technical

Shinken services and you (writing your own service)

Introduction Shinken is a monitoring service based on Nagios written in python. The cool stuff here is that it's written in python, but also that you are able to use many, if not all, Nagios plugins. "But Maarten, why is it so great that it's written in python ?"

Technical

Enable AUFS support for docker on SoYouStart (OVH)

I'm using a SoYouStart server from OVH for a project where I need to deploy Docker containers. I kept having errors of the like: Error response from daemon: Cannot start container f5fa26a2b00e154dd851cfbf4459d03e996dea7b3fc18d9c51dc5b24bb132e32: fork/exec /var/lib/docker/init/dockerinit-1.0.1: invalid argument After checking on Docker's GitHub, it seems

Technical

How to fix a broken Ubuntu package installation

Today I wanted to reinstall an openldap server for which I didn't have credentials, but where I had root access. Some files were left after I removed the package, so I tried to remove them manually, but doing so I interfered with the apt cleanup process and I ended up

Technical

CTE and closure tables

Closure tables There is a lot of techniques to store and manipulate tree-like structures in a relational database. Among them, the one that is noteworthy for his simplicity and performance is the Closure Table approach. The basic idea is to store all the ancestor-descendant relation and their depths. So from