Curated river of news
Latest posts from blogs I follow
We have more ways to manage dependencies in Python applications than ever. But how do they fare in production? Unfortunately this topic turned out to be quite polarizing and was at the center of a lot of heated debates. This ...
We run our backup job schedules based on the tags assigned to the VM. This keeps it relatively simple and to add a system to a backup job you only need to tag it, not go into another software and ...
We'll add some custom functionality to the composer package we created in part one to create a Laravel boilerplate with things set up just how we prefer.
Laravel provides frontend scaffolding, but you may want a more customized boilerplate to start projects from. Learn to create your own package to do just that!
Follow along as I set up a macOS desktop from scratch. Development environments, apps, code editors, all the settings, and some useful shortcuts!
The DevOps movement gave us many ways to put Python applications into production. But how can you practically structure and configure your applications to make them indifferent to the environment they run in? How do secrets fit into the picture? ...
Most Python programmers don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how equality and hashing works. It usually just works. However there’s quite a bit of gotchas and edge cases that can lead to subtle and frustrating bugs once one ...
Proper cleanup when terminating your application isn’t less important when it’s running inside of a Docker container. Although it only comes down to making sure signals reach your application and handling them, there’s a bunch of things that can go ...
I’ve seen quite a bit of the world thanks to being invited to speak at conferences. Since some people are under the impression that serial conference speakers possess some special talents, I’d like to demystify my process by walking you ...
No matter whether you run a web app, search for gravitational waves, or maintain a backup script: reliability of your systems make the difference between sweet dreams and production nightmares at 4am.
Someone asked on Twitter how I made my pasta sauce, so here is the recipe! The base of my Pasta sauce is largely this recipe, except I mostly don’t add mozzarella: At it’s simplest I can make the whole thing ...
Wouldn't it be great if we could quickly access the exact Laravel documentation page you need right from your code editor? Now you can!
The Python standard library is full of underappreciated gems. One of them allows for simple and elegant function dispatching based on argument types. This makes it perfect for serialization of arbitrary objects – for example to JSON in web APIs ...
If your Python decorator unintentionally changes the signatures of my callables or doesn’t work with class methods, it’s broken and should be fixed. Sadly most decorators are broken because the web is full of bad advice.
This article was originally posted on the Universal Mind blog in June 2016. It’s come to my attention lately that my kitchen is absolutely riddled with poor experiences. Most of the appliances and apparatus one uses on a day-to-day basis ...
To get real time insight into running applications you need to instrument them and collect metrics: count events, measure times, expose numbers. That used to be a clusterfuck of technologies and approaches. Prometheus changes that.
Since the inception of wheels that install Python packages without executing arbitrary code, we need a static way to encode conditional dependencies for our packages. Thanks to PEP 508 we do have a blessed way but sadly the prevalence of ...
The padlock that had seized shut on my back gate was proving hard to remove, the hardened steel U was not yielding to my hacksaw. I noticed some rivets underneath that turned out to be soft steel. 10 minutes of ...
My completely anecdotal view on the state of Python 3 in 2016. Based on my own recent experience, observations, and exchanges with other members of the Python community.
Don’t use Python’s hasattr() unless you’re writing Python 3-only code and understand how it works.
Why “Use bcrypt.” is not the best recommendation (anymore).
How to ensure that your tests run code that you think they are running, and how to measure your coverage over multiple tox runs (in parallel!).
Random graph, from playing around with RGL in Ruby. I like it, but it's pointless
Say you have a graph like this: A simple graph How do you find out if there is a path between any of the two nodes? By using a breadth-first search: require 'rgl/implicit' require 'rgl/traversal' vertices = ["one", "two", "three"] ...
Your Python applications are running but you’re wondering what they are doing? The only clue about their current state is the server load after ssh-ing into the servers? Let’s change that!
This article was originally written for the Fusionbox blog in January 2015. The Fusionbox process takes many pages from the Great Big Book of Agile Methodology to streamline and modernize the production of web content, etcetera, but for the folks ...
Setting up Python to the point to be able install packages from PyPI can be annoying and time-intensive. Even worse are OS-provided installations that start throwing cryptic error messages. Especially desktops are prone to that but it’s possible to break ...
I’m making a simple camera gimbal and tonight I wired up the right analog stick on my xbox controller to control the pan/tilt servos: Tomorrow I will print out a prototype gimbal structure.
A couple of ruby one-liners for dumping out the content of a github commit hook payload: For hooks that use type application/json: $ ruby -rpp -rjson -rsinatra -e 'set :port, 8000; post "/*" do; pp JSON(request.body.read); end' For hooks that ...
It’s a good idea to set an IAM access policy for anything that accesses AWS using your account details, I wanted to do this for s3cmd syncing a local directory to an s3 bucket. There are a number of posts ...
TLS is the best technology we have for securing our communications. It comes with many sharp edges though. This talk tries to jumpstart a rough understanding and these links should help you to complete the picture.
Apple ships a patched version of OpenSSL with macOS. If no precautions are taken, their changes rob you of the power to choose your trusted certificate authorities (CAs) and break the semantics of a callback that can be used for ...
My robot was written about recently on the Raspberry Pi foundation blog (now seemingly removed 😢, but still available on archive.org), and now on the Pololu blog too, the place I originally got my tracks from!
I took my robot to RubyConf. It’s not really Ruby related, but I figured it would go down like a robot at a programmers conference… So I took the robot apart, packed it away and headed to Miami: The view ...
