Ana Balica

Hi, I'm Ana.

I'm a software developer. I mostly do Python. This blog is about my adventures with code, travel experiences and relevant life events. I try not to take myself too seriously.

Here's what I'm doing now.

Occasionally I give talks.

Please don't take my words for granted, because Internet is full of bad advice, and I might be part of it inadvertently.

Right time, right place

I started reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Believe it or not, this is the first book I picked up by him. I’ve been pleasantly surprised how entertaining the book themes are - everybody likes a good story tied in with...

How to feedback

These are some things I learned over the years about feedback. Why Never loose focus on why we give and receive feedback. We do that because we want to help others excel and to better ourselves. Further below I break...

Shameless reading of notes on stage

I’ve given talks on stage since 2015. With time and practice I found my own style and pace. I learned things that come to me easily and things that I struggle with. One of these things is speaking fluently and...

Empathetic bug report

“Feature X doesn’t work”. Sigh, take a deep breath, pause for a bit… start asking questions: what exactly doesn’t work, what do you see on screen, do you have a URL or screenshots, what environment are you on, are you...

How to filter by DateRange with django-filters

Django offers a few fields that are exclusive to Postgres. I recently had to use DateRangeField which is an interesting alternative to doing the usual start_date and end_date. If you’re using Django Rest Framework, you are probably familiar with django-filters....

My parents told me I'm pretty

As I child, I hated my skin colour, my name, my boring hair colour, my height, my asymmetrical eyes and lack of lashes on a patch of my left eye. When I say “hate”, this was the literal word I’d...

Dealing with disagreements

You are in an interview. The interviewer across the table asks you: ‘What do you do if you disagree with someone on your team? How do you resolve this situation?’. You pause and take 10 seconds to think about it....

The Cemetery of Ideas or Why I Stopped Writing

My last blogpost was published on November 11th 2017, which would make it over half a year old. I don’t think the reason for my writing blackout was general busyness of life. Yes, I did transition into a new role...

Python: mutable vs immutable

Mutable means an object can be modified after it’s been created. In contrast immutable is an object whose state can’t be changed after its creation. Python has both mutable and immutable data types. There’s a simple recipe to figure out...

Struggling for creativity

When I was in middle school (somewhere between 12 and 16 years old), I wrote an essay for our English class about the butterfly life cycle. It was a short read and in some way beautiful (for a school assignment)....