Super Swing Districts
In my corner of the social graph, when we talk about politics today, we tend to use a lot of moralizing language. A lot of emotive language. And that makes sense; overt fascist are repeating the...
View ArticlePotato Programming
One potato, two potato, three potato, four Five potato, six potato, seven potato, more.Traditional Children’s Counting RhymeProgrammers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about,...
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A Very Silly Program
One of the persistently lesser-known symptoms of ADHD is hyperfocus. It is sometimes quasi-accurately described as a “superpower”12, which it can be. In the right conditions, hyperfocus is the ability...
View ArticleData Classification
Is there a place for non-@dataclass classes in Python any more?I have previously — and somewhat famously — written favorably about @dataclass’s venerable progenitor, attrs, and how you should use it...
View ArticleBuilding And Distributing A macOS Application Written in Python
Why Bother With All This?In other words: if you want to run on an Apple platform, why not just write everything in an Apple programming language, like Swift? If you need to ship to multiple platforms,...
View ArticleWhat Would You Say You Do Here?
What have I been up to?Late last year, I launched a Patreon. Although not quite a “soft” launch — I did toot about it, after all — I didn’t promote it very much.I started this way because I realized...
View ArticleTelemetry Is Not Your Enemy
Part 1: A Tale of Two MetaphorsIn software development “telemetry” is data collected from users of the software, almost always delivered to the authors of the software via the Internet.In recent years,...
View ArticleA Response to Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s “Incompetent But Nice”
Jacob Kaplan-Moss has written a post about one of the most stressful things that can happen to you as a manager: when someone on your team is getting along well with the team, apparently trying their...
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No Executable Is An Island
One of the perennial talking points in the Python packaging discourse is that it’s unnecessarily difficult to create a simple, single-file binary that you can hand to users.This complaint is...
View ArticlePost-PyCon-US 2023 Notes
PyCon 2023 was last week, and I wanted to write some notes on it while the memory is fresh. Much of this was jotted down on the plane ride home and edited a few days later.Health & SafetyEven given...
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Bilithification
Several years ago at O’Reilly’s Software Architecture conference, within a comprehensive talk on refactoring “Technical Debt: A Masterclass”, r0ml1 presented a concept that I think should be...
View ArticleGet Your Mac Python From Python.org
One of the most unfortunate things about learning Python is that there are so many different ways to get it installed, and you need to choose one before you even begin. The differences can also be...
View ArticleOkay, I’m A Centrist I Guess
Today I saw a short YouTube video about “cozy games” and started writing a comment, then realized that this was somehow prompting me to write the most succinct summary of my own personal views on...
View ArticleYour Text Editor (Probably) Isn’t Malware Any More
In 2015, I wrote one of my more popular blog posts, “Your Text Editor Is Malware”, about the sorry state of security in text editors in general, but particularly in Emacs and Vim.It’s nearly been a...
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Unsigned Commits
I am going to tell you why I don’t think you should sign your Git commits, even though doing so with SSH keys is now easier than ever. But first, to contextualize my objection, I have a brief...
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The Macintosh
Today is the 40th anniversary of the announcement of the Macintosh. Others have articulated compelling emotional narratives that easily eclipse my own similar childhood memories of the Macintosh family...
View ArticleLet Me Tell You A Secret
I do consulting1 on software architecture, network protocol development, python software infrastructure, streamlined cloud deployment, and open source strategy, among other nerdy things. I enjoy...
View ArticleDBXS 0.1.0
New ReleaseYesterday I published a new release of DBXS for you all. It’s still ZeroVer, but it has graduated from double-ZeroVer as this is the first nonzero minor version.More to the point though, the...
View ArticleThe Hat
This year I will be going to two conferences: PyCon 2024, and North Bay Python 2024.At PyCon, I will be promoting my open source work and my writing on this blog. As I’m not giving a talk this year, I...
View ArticleSoftware Needs To Be More Expensive
The Cost of CoffeeOne of the ideas that James Hoffmann— probably the most influential… influencer in the coffee industry — works hard to popularize is that “coffee needs to be more expensive”.The...
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