The Engine Room

In a previous post we discussed a basic use case for Python's fantastic mock library, showing how mock objects are useful for isolating components of an application and creating clean unit tests. By testing against the fake interface provided by a mock object, we can check how our functions are ... Read more.

TrackMaven's next Monthly Challenge meetup will cover mobile development. To help kickstart some projects, in this post I'll cover the basics of one way to get started creating a cross-platform mobile app.

We'll be using Read more.

Since this is the first year that TrackMaven has our Engine Room blog, this will be our first year in review. But I am hoping that this is a trend that will continue as we grow! We want to highlight a lot of what we did during 2014, and show our incredible growth as a department. You can head over to see our company-wide 2014 in review to get a ... Read more.

At TrackMaven we are big users of Celery, an asynchronous task queue written in Python. Today we're happy to release a useful package we have been using internally called Celery Once!

Celery Once allows you to specify and run unique tasks across your distributed Celery cluster. It can ... Read more.

Using CartoDB and Three.js for mapping

Our next monthly challenge is visualization! Although you could visualize data on just about anything in just about any way, for this post we're going to focus on mapping data geographically using two different tools:

• CartoDB: a great drag-and-drop solution for super quick and simple map creation ... Read more.

Read Part 1 or Part 2

Tuning your PostgreSQL servers on Amazon EC2

It will probably come as no surprise that the settings that are best for your PostgreSQL cluster are heavily dependent on your data and how you're using it. ... Read more.

Today I will be talking about onboarding! We will cover what the heck onboarding means, why it is important, and then gasp I'll attempt to grade how well my new coworkers onboarded me in my first month. Bear in mind that this will be focused on engineering only.

With that, let us begin!

What is onboarding?

Onboarding is the mechanism with which ... Read more.

Today we will be talking about mocking. No, not the joke at someone else's expense kind. Mocking is a technique to temporarily replace real parts of our code with fake, simpler parts, so that we can check that the rest of the parts are working as we intend. Here we'll consider some simple use cases for mocking in Python tests, and try to show how this ... Read more.

Our topic for this month's Monthly Challenge meetup is NLP! In this post, we'll get you started with one possibility: using pandas and Python's Natural Language Toolkit to analyze the contents your own Gmail inbox. For those of you who are continuing ... Read more.

Thanks to everyone who came out and presented at our inaugural Monthly Challenge meetup! We had a great variety of Elasticsearch-related projects. Here's a quick rundown from the night:

• Our jumpstart blog post introduced a ... Read more.