FLOSS Project Planets

Or "How I've halved the execution time of our tests by removing ten lines". Catchy, huh? Also not exactly true, but quite close. Enjoy!

Molecule?!

"Molecule project is designed to aid in the development and testing of Ansible roles."

No idea about the development part (I have vim and mkdir), but it's really good for integration testing. You can write different test scenarios where you define an environment (usually a container), a playbook for the execution and a playbook for verification. (And a lot more, but that's quite unimportant for now, so go read the docs if you want more details.)

If you ever used Beaker for Puppet integration testing, you'll feel right at home (once you've thrown away Ruby and DSLs and embraced YAML for everything).

I'd like to point out one thing, before we continue. Have another look at the quote above.

"Molecule project is designed to aid in the development and testing of Ansible roles."

That's right. The project was started in 2015 and was always about roles. There is nothing wrong about that, but given the Ansible world has moved on to collections (which can contain roles), you start facing challenges.

Challenges using Ansible Molecule in the Collections world

The biggest challenge didn't change since the last time I looked at the topic in 2020: running tests for multiple roles in a single repository ("monorepo") is tedious.

Well, guess what a collection is? Yepp, a repository with multiple roles in it.

It did get a bit better though. There is pytest-ansible now, which has integration for Molecule. This allows the execution of Molecule and even provides reasonable logging with something as short as:

% pytest --molecule roles/

That's much better than the shell script I used in 2020!

However, being able to execute tests is one thing. Being able to execute them fast is another one.

Given Molecule was initially designed with single roles in mind, it has switches to run all scenarios of a role (--all), but it has no way to run these in parallel. That's fine if you have one or two scenarios in your role repository. But what if you have 10 in your collection?

"No way?!" you say after quickly running molecule test --help, "But there is…"

% molecule test --help Usage: molecule test [OPTIONS] [ANSIBLE_ARGS]... … --parallel / --no-parallel Enable or disable parallel mode. Default is disabled. …

Yeah, that switch exists, but it only tells Molecule to place things in separate folders, you still need to parallelize yourself with GNU parallel or pytest.

And here our actual journey starts!

Running Ansible Molecule tests in parallel

To run Molecule via pytest in parallel, we can use pytest-xdist, which allows pytest to run the tests in multiple processes.

With that, our pytest call becomes something like this:

% MOLECULE_OPTS="--parallel" pytest --numprocesses auto --molecule roles/

What does that mean?

• MOLECULE_OPTS passes random options to the Molecule call pytest does, and we need to add --parallel there.
• --numprocesses auto tells pytest-xdist to create as many workers as you have CPUs and balance the work across those.

However, once we actually execute it, we see:

% MOLECULE_OPTS="--parallel" pytest --numprocesses auto --molecule roles/ … WARNING Driver podman does not provide a schema. INFO debian scenario test matrix: dependency, cleanup, destroy, syntax, create, prepare, converge, idempotence, side_effect, verify, cleanup, destroy INFO Performing prerun with role_name_check=0... WARNING Retrying execution failure 250 of: ansible-galaxy collection install -vvv --force ../.. ERROR Command returned 250 code: … OSError: [Errno 39] Directory not empty: 'roles' … FileExistsError: [Errno 17] File exists: b'/home/user/namespace.collection/collections/ansible_collections/namespace/collection' … FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: b'/home/user/namespace.collection//collections/ansible_collections/namespace/collection/roles/my_role/molecule/debian/molecule.yml'

You might see other errors, other paths, etc, but they all will have one in common: they indicate that either files or directories are present, while the tool expects them not to be, or vice versa.

Ah yes, that fine smell of race conditions.

I'll spare you the wild-goose chase I went on when trying to find out what the heck was calling ansible-galaxy collection install here. Instead, I'll just point at the following line:

INFO Performing prerun with role_name_check=0...

What is this "prerun" you ask? Well… "To help Ansible find used modules and roles, molecule will perform a prerun set of actions. These involve installing dependencies from requirements.yml specified at the project level, installing a standalone role or a collection."

Turns out, this step is not --parallel-safe (yet?).

Luckily, it can easily be disabled, for all our roles in the collection:

% mkdir -p .config/molecule % echo 'prerun: false' >> .config/molecule/config.yml

This works perfectly, as long as you don't have any dependencies.

And we don't have any, right? We didn't define any in a molecule/collections.yml, our collection has none.

So let's push a PR with that and see what our CI thinks.

OSError: [Errno 39] Directory not empty: 'tests'

Huh?

FileExistsError: [Errno 17] File exists: b'remote.sh' -> b'/home/runner/work/namespace.collection/namespace.collection/collections/ansible_collections/ansible/posix/tests/utils/shippable/aix.sh'

What?

ansible_compat.errors.InvalidPrerequisiteError: Found collection at '/home/runner/work/namespace.collection/namespace.collection/collections/ansible_collections/ansible/posix' but missing MANIFEST.json, cannot get info.

Okay, okay, I get the idea… But why?

Well, our collection might not have any dependencies, BUT MOLECULE HAS! When using Docker containers, it uses community.docker, when using Podman containers.podman, etc…

So we have to install those before running Molecule, and everything should be fine. We even can use Molecule to do this!

$ molecule dependency --scenario <scenario>

And with that knowledge, the patch to enable parallel Molecule execution on GitHub Actions using pytest-xdist becomes:

diff --git a/.config/molecule/config.yml b/.config/molecule/config.yml new file mode 100644 index 0000000..32ed66d --- /dev/null +++ b/.config/molecule/config.yml @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +prerun: false diff --git a/.github/workflows/test.yml b/.github/workflows/test.yml index 0f9da0d..df55a15 100644 --- a/.github/workflows/test.yml +++ b/.github/workflows/test.yml @@ -58,9 +58,13 @@ jobs: - name: Install Ansible run: pip install --upgrade https://github.com/ansible/ansible/archive/${{ matrix.ansible }}.tar.gz - name: Install dependencies - run: pip install molecule molecule-plugins pytest pytest-ansible + run: pip install molecule molecule-plugins pytest pytest-ansible pytest-xdist + - name: Install collection dependencies + run: cd roles/repository && molecule dependency -s suse - name: Run tests - run: pytest -vv --molecule roles/ + run: pytest -vv --numprocesses auto --molecule roles/ + env: + MOLECULE_OPTS: --parallel ansible-lint: runs-on: ubuntu-latest

But you promised us to delete ten lines, that's just a +7-2 patch!

Oh yeah, sorry, the +10-20 (so a net -10) is the foreman-operations-collection version of the patch, that also migrates from an ugly bash script to pytest-ansible.

And yes, that cuts down the execution from ~26 minutes to ~13 minutes.

In the collection I originally tested this with, it's a more moderate "from 8-9 minutes to 5-6 minutes", which is still good though :)

The DSF Board are pleased to introduce Baptiste Mispelon as a new member of the ops team. Baptiste will join the team who maintains Django’s infrastructure.

Baptiste speaking at Django Under the Hood 2015

Baptiste (IPA pronunciation /ba.tist/) is a long-time Django contributor, having been a member of the community for over a decade now.

He was an initial board member of the Django Girls Foundation, co-created the Django Under the Hood, series of conferences, and was chair of the Djangocon Europe 2016 edition. More recently, he's taken up the maintenance of Django's venerable ticket tracker: code.djangoproject.com.

He currently lives in the Norwegian countryside where he works part time as a Django developer while studying for a degree in linguistics at the local university.

You can learn more about Baptiste on his website.

I’m also taking this time to thanks the OPS team on the behalf of the DSF board for their efforts on the maintenance during all the time of their service.

Please join me in welcoming Baptiste in the OPS team!

Droidian Support for Note 9

Droidian only supported the version of this phone with the Exynos chipset. The GSM Arena specs page for the Note 9 shows that it’s the SM-N960F part number [1]. In Australia all Note 9 phones should have the Exynos but it doesn’t hurt to ask for the part number before buying.

The status of the Note9 in Droidian went from fully supported to totally unsupported in the time I was working on this blog post. Such a rapid change is disappointing, it would be good if they at least kept the old data online. It would also be good if they didn’t require a hash character in the URL for each phone which breaks the archive.org mirroring.

Installing Droidian

Firstly Power+VolumeDown will reboot in some situations where Power button on it’s own won’t. The Note 9 hardware keys are:

• Power – Right side
• Volume up/down – long button top of the left side
• Bixby – key for Samsung assistant that’s below the volume on the left

The Droidian install document for the Galaxy Note 9 9 now deleted is a bit confusing and unclear. Here is the install process that worked for me.

1. The doc says to start by installing “Android 10 (Q) stock firmware”, but apparently a version of Android 10 that’s already on the phone will do for that.
2. Download the rescue.img file and the “Droidian’s image” files from the Droidian page and extract the “Droidian’s image” zip.
3. Connect your phone to your workstation by USB, preferably USB 3 because it will take a few minutes to transfer the image at USB 2 speed. Install the Debian package adb on the workstation.
4. To “Unlock the bootloader” you can apparently use a PC and the Samsung software but the unlock option in the Android settings gives the same result without proprietary software, here’s how to do it:
   1. Connect the phone to Wifi. Then in settings go to “Software update”, then click on “Download and install”. Refuse to install if it offers you a new version (the unlock menu item will never appear unless you do this, so you can’t unlock without Internet access).
   2. In settings go to “About phone”, then “Software information”, then tap on “Build number” repeatedly until “Developer mode” is enabled.
   3. In settings go to the new menu “Developer options” then turn on the “OEM unlocking” option, this does a factory reset of the phone.
5. To flash the recovery.img you apparently use Odin on Windows. I used the heimdall-flash package on Debian. On your Linux workstation run the commands: adb reboot download heimdall flash --RECOVERY recovery.img

   Then press VOLUME-UP+BIXBY+POWER as soon as it reboots to get into the recovery image. If you don’t do it soon enough it will do a default Android boot which will wipe the recovery.img you installed and also do a factory reset which will disable “Developer mode” and you will need to go back to step 4.

6. If the above step works correctly you will have a RECOVERY menu where the main menu has options “Reboot system now”, “Apply update”, “Factory reset”, and “Advanced” in a large font. If you failed to install recovery.img then you would get a similar menu but with a tiny font which is the Samsung recovery image which won’t work so reboot and try again.
7. When at the main recovery menu select “Advanced” and then “Enter fastboot”. Note that this doesn’t run a different program or do anything obviously different, just gives a menu – that’s OK we want it at this menu.
8. Run “./flash_all.sh” on your workstation.
9. Then it should boot Droidian! This may take a bit of time.

First Tests Battery

The battery and it’s charge and discharge rates are very important to me, it’s what made the PinePhonePro and Librem5 unusable as daily driver phones.

After running for about 100 minutes of which about 40 minutes were playing with various settings the phone was at 89% battery. The output of “upower -d” isn’t very accurate as it reported power use ranging from 0W to 25W! But this does suggest that the phone might last for 400 minutes of real use that’s not CPU intensive, such as reading email, document editing, and web browsing. I don’t think that 6.5 hours of doing such things non-stop without access to a power supply or portable battery is something I’m ever going to do. Samsung when advertising the phone claimed 17 hours of video playback which I don’t think I’m ever going to get – or want.

After running for 11 hours it was at 58% battery. Then after just over 21 hours of running it had 13% battery. Generally I don’t trust the upower output much but the fact that it ran for over 21 hours shows that it’s battery life is much better than the PinePhonePro and the Librem5. During that 21 hours I’ve had a ssh session open with the client set to send ssh keep-alive messages every minute. So it had to remain active. There is an option to suspend on Droidian but they recommend you don’t use it. There is no need for the “caffeine mode” that you have on Mobian. For comparison my previous tests suggested that when doing nothing a PinePhonePro might last for 30 hours on battery while the Liberem5 might only list 10 hours [2]. This test with Droidian was done with the phone within my reach for much of that time and subject to my desire to fiddle with new technology – so it wasn’t just sleeping all the time.

When charging from the USB port on my PC it went from 13% to 27% charge in half an hour and then after just over an hour it claimed to be at 33%. It ended up taking just over 7 hours to fully charge from empty that’s not great but not too bad for a PC USB port. This is the same USB port that my Librem5 couldn’t charge from. Also the discharge:charge ratio of 21:7 is better than I could get from the PinePhonePro with Caffeine mode enabled.

rndis0

The rndis0 interface used for IP over USB doesn’t work. Droidian bug #36 [3].

Other Hardware

The phone I bought for testing is the model with 6G of RAM and 128G of storage, has a minor screen crack and significant screen burn-in. It’s a good test system for $109. The screen burn-in is very obvious when running the default Android setup but when running the default Droidian GNOME setup set to the Dark theme (which is a significant power saving with an AMOLED screen) I can’t see it at all. Buying a cheap phone with screen burn-in is something I recommend.

The stylus doesn’t work, this isn’t listed on the Droidian web page. I’m not sure if I tested the stylus when the phone was running Android, I think I did.

D State Processes

I get a kernel panic early in the startup for unknown reasons and some D state kernel threads which may or may not be related to that. Droidian bug #37 [4].

Second Phone The Phone

I ordered a second Note9 on ebay, it had been advertised at $240 for a month and the seller accepted my offer of $200. With postage that’s $215 for a Note9 in decent condition with 8G of RAM and 512G of storage. But Droidian dropped support for the Note9 before I got to install it. At the moment I’m not sure what I’ll do with this, maybe I’ll keep it on Android.

I also bought four phone cases for $16. I got spares because of the high price of postage relative to the case cost and the fact that they may be difficult to get in a few years.

The Tests

For the next phone my plan was to do more tests on Android before upgrading it to Debian. Here are the ones I can think of now, please suggest any others I should do.

• Log output of “ps auxf” equivalent.
• Make notes on what they are doing with SE Linux.
• Test the stylus.
• Test USB networking to my workstation and my laptop.
• Make a copy of the dmesg output. Also look for D state processes and other signs of problems.

Droidian and Security

When I tell technical people about Droidian a common reaction is “great you can get a cheap powerful phone and have better security than Android”. This is wrong in several ways. Firstly Android has quite decent security. Android runs most things in containers and uses SE Linux. Droidian has the Debian approach for most software (IE it all runs under the same UID without any special protections) and the developers have no plans to use SE Linux. I’ve previously blogged about options for Sandboxing for Debian phone use, my blog post is NOT a solution to the problem but an analysis of the different potential ways of going about solving it [5].

The next issue is that Droidian has no way to update the kernel and the installation instructions often advise downgrading Android (running a less secure kernel) before the installation. The Android Generic Kernel Image project [6] addresses this by allowing a separation between drivers supplied by the hardware vendor and the kernel image supplied by Google. This also permits running the hardware vendor’s drivers with a GKI kernel released by Google after the hardware vendor dropped security support. But this only applies to Android 11 and later, so Android 10 devices (like the Note 9 image for Droidian) miss out on this.

• [1] https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_note9-9163.php
• [2] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/06/06/pinephonepro-first-impression/
• [3] https://github.com/droidian/droidian/issues/36
• [4] https://github.com/droidian/droidian/issues/37
• [5] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/07/08/sandboxing-phone-apps/
• [6] https://tinyurl.com/236bjztz

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Introduction

In the past few years python has gained a huge popularity as a programming language in data science world. Many banks and pharma organisations have started using Python and some of them are in transition stage, migrating SAS syntax library to Python.

Many big organisations have been using SAS since early 2000 and they developed a hundreds of SAS codes for various tasks ranging from data extraction to model building and validation. Hence it's a marathon task to migrate SAS code to any other programming language. Migration can only be done in phases so day to day tasks would not be hit by development and testing of python code. Since Python is open source it becomes difficult sometimes in terms of maintaining the existing code. Some SAS procedures are very robust and powerful in nature its alternative in Python is still not implemented, might be doable but not a straightforward way for average developer or analyst.

Do you wish to run both SAS and Python programs in the same environment (IDE)? If yes, you are not the only one. Many analysts have been desiring the same. It is possible now via python package called saspy developed by SAS. It allows flexibility to transfer data between Pandas Dataframe and SAS Dataset. Imagine a situation when you have data in pandas dataframe and you wish to run SAS statistical procedure on the same without switching between SAS and Python environment.

Table of Contents Access to SAS Software for free

First and Foremost is to have access to SAS either via cloud or server/desktop version of software.

If you don't have SAS software, you don't need to worry. You can get it for free without installation via SAS OnDemand for Academics It is available for free for everyone (not restricted to students or academicians). It includes access to all the commonly used SAS modules like SAS STAT, SAS ETS, SAS SQL etc. You just need to do registration once and it does not take more than 5 minutes.

saspy python package has the following dependencies :

• Python 3.4 or higher
• SAS 9.4 or higher

Steps to access SAS in Python (Jupyter)

Please follow the steps below to make SAS run in Jupyter Notebook.

Step 1 : Install Package

To install saspy package you can run the following command in Python.

!pip install saspy To read this article in full, please click hereThis post appeared first on ListenData

6 months ago I switched to Kitty for terminal emulation [1]. So far there’s only been one thing that I couldn’t effectively do with Kitty that I did with Konsole in the past, that is watching a music video in 1/4 of the screen while using the rest for terminals. I could setup multiple Kitty windows taking up the rest of the screen but I wanted to keep using a single Kitty with multiple terminals and just have mpv go over one of them. Kitty supports it’s own graphical interface so “mpv –vo=kitty” works but took 6* the CPU power in my tests which isn’t good for a laptop.

For X11 there’s a –ontop option for mpv that does what you expect, but that doesn’t work on Wayland. Not working is mostly Wayland’s fault as there is a long tail of less commonly used graphical operations that work in X11 but aren’t yet implemented in Wayland. I have filed a Debian bug report about this, the mpv man page should note that it’s only going to work on X11 on Linux.

I have discovered a solution to that, in the KDE settings there’s a “Window Rules” section, I created an entry for “Window class” exactly matching “mpv” and then added a rule “Keep above other windows” and set it for “force” and “yes”.

After that I can just resize mpv to occlude just one terminal and keep using the rest. Also one noteworthy thing with this is that it makes mpv go on top of the KDE taskbar, which can be a feature.

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/10/29/hello-kitty/

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Over the past year or two, I've been heavily using FastAPI in my day job. I've been around the Python web framework block, and I gotta say, FastAPI really succeeds in its mission of building on the strengths of its predecessors (particularly Django and Flask), while feeling more modern and adhering to certain opinionated principles. In my opinion, it's pretty much exactly what the best-in-breed of the next logical generation of web frameworks should look like.

¡Ándale, ándale, arriba!
Image source: The Guardian

Let me start by lauding FastAPI's excellent documentation. Having a track record of rock-solid documentation, was (and still is!) – in my opinion – Django's most impressive achievement, and I'm pleased to see that it's also becoming Django's most enduring legacy. FastAPI, like Django, includes docs changes together with code changes in a single (these days called) pull request; it clearly documents that certain features are deprecated; and its docs often go beyond what is strictly required, by including end-to-end instructions for integrating with various third-party tools and services.

FastAPI's docs raise the bar further still, with more than a dash of humour in many sections, and with a frequent sprinkling of emojis as standard fare. That latter convention I have some reservations about – call me old-fashioned, but you could say that emoji-filled docs is unprofessional and is a distraction. However, they seem to enhance rather than detract from overall quality; and, you know what, they put a non-emoji real-life smile on my face. So, they get my tick of approval.

FastAPI more-or-less sits in the Flask camp of being a "microframework", in that it doesn't include an ORM, a template engine, or various other things that Django has always advertised as being part of its "batteries included" philosophy. But, on the other hand, it's more in the Django camp of being highly opinionated, and of consciously including things with which it wants a hassle-free experience. Most notably, it includes Swagger UI and Redoc out-of-the-box. I personally had quite a painful experience generating Swagger docs in Flask, back in the day; and I've been tremendously pleased with how API doc generation Just Works™ in FastAPI.

Much like with Flask, being a microframework means that FastAPI very much stands on the shoulders of giants. Just as Flask is a thin wrapper on top of Werkzeug, with the latter providing all things WSGI; so too is FastAPI a thin wrapper on top of Starlette, with the latter providing all things ASGI. FastAPI also heavily depends on Pydantic for data schemas / validation, for strongly-typed superpowers, for settings handling, and for all things JSON. I think it's fair to say that Pydantic is FastAPI's secret sauce.

My use of FastAPI so far has been rather unusual, in that I've been building apps that primarily talk to an Oracle database (and, indeed, this is unusual for Python dev more generally). I started out by depending on the (now-deprecated) cx_Oracle library, and I've recently switched to its successor python-oracledb. I was pleased to see that the fine folks at Oracle recently released full async support for python-oracledb, which I'm now taking full advantage of in the context of FastAPI. I wrote a little library called fastapi-oracle which I'm using as a bit of glue code, and I hope it's of use to anyone else out there who needs to marry those two particular bits of tech together.

There has been a not-insignificant amount of chit-chat on the interwebz lately, voicing concern that FastAPI is a one-man show (with its BDFL @tiangolo showing no intention of that changing anytime soon), and that the FastAPI issue and pull request queues receive insufficient TLC. Based on my experience so far, I'm not too concerned about this. It is, generally speaking, not ideal if a project has a bus factor of 1, and if support requests and bug fixes are left to rot.

However, in my opinion, the code and the documentation of FastAPI are both high-quality and highly-consistent, and I appreciate that this is largely thanks to @tiangolo continuing to personally oversee every small change, and that loosening the reins would mean a high risk of that deteriorating. And, speaking of quality, I personally have yet to uncover any bugs either in FastAPI or its core dependencies (which I'm pleasantly surprised by, considering how heavily I've been using it) – it would appear that the items languishing in the queue are lower priority, and it would appear that @tiangolo is on top of critical bugs as they arise.

In summary, I'm enjoying coding with FastAPI, I feel like it's a great fit for building Python web apps in 2024, and it will continue to be my Python framework of choice for the foreseeable future.

The eleventh release of the qlcal package arrivied at CRAN today.

qlcal delivers the calendaring parts of QuantLib. It is provided (for the R package) as a set of included files, so the package is self-contained and does not depend on an external QuantLib library (which can be demanding to build). qlcal covers over sixty country / market calendars and can compute holiday lists, its complement (i.e. business day lists) and much more. Examples are in the README at the repository, the package page, and course at the CRAN package page.

This releases synchronizes qlcal with the QuantLib release 1.34 and contains more updates to 2024 calendars.

Changes in version 0.0.11 (2024-04-27)

• Synchronized with QuantLib 1.34

• Calendar updates for Brazil, India, Singapore, South Africa, Thailand, United States

• Minor continuous integration update

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report for this release. See the project page and package documentation for more details, and more examples. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

10 years and 10 days ago I flew home from my very first Python conference.

I left a few days into the PyCon US 2014 sprints and I remember feeling a bit like summer camp was ending. I’d played board games, contributed to an open source project, seen tons of talks, and met a ton of people.

My first Python conference: PyCon US 2014

PyCon 2014 was the first Python conference I attended.

At the start of the conference I only knew a handful of San Diegans. I left having met many more folks. Some of the folks I met I knew from online forums, GitHub repos, or videos I met Kenneth Love, Baptiste Mispelon, Carl Meyer, Eric Holscher in-person, among many others. Most folks I met I had never encountered online, but I was glad to have met in person.

For the most part, I had no idea who anyone was, what they did with Python, or what they might be interested in talking about. I also had no idea what most of the various non-talk activities were. I found out about the Education Summit and hadn’t realized that it required pre-registration. The open spaces are one of my favorite parts of PyCon and I didn’t even they existed until PyCon 2015.

I did stay for a couple days of the sprints and I was grateful for that. Most of the memorable human connections I had were during the sprints. I helped PyVideo upgrade their code base from Python 2 to Python 3 (this was before Will and Sheila stepped down as maintainers). Will guided me through the code base and seemed grateful for the help.

I also got the idea to write front-end JavaScript tests for Django during the sprints and eventually started that process after PyCon thanks to Carl Meyer’s guidance.

Attending regional conferences and DjangoCon

In fall 2014, I attended Django BarCamp at the Eventbrite office. That was my first exposure to the idea of an “unconference”… which I kept in mind when I spotted the open spaces board at PyCon 2015.

Before coming back to Montreal for PyCon 2015, I emailed Harry Percival to ask if he could use a teaching assistant during his tutorial on writing tests. His reply was much more enthusiastic than I expected: “YES YES OH GOD YES THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU TREY”. I was very honored to be able to help Harry, as my testing workflow was heavily inspired by many blog posts he’d written about testing best practices in Django.

I coached at my first Django Girls event in 2015 in Ensenada and then my second at DjangoCon 2015 in Austin. I gave my first lightning talk at DjangoCon 2015, comparing modern JavaScript to Python. It was a lightning talk I had given at the San Diego JavaScript and San Diego Python meetups.

In 2016, I attended PyTennessee in Nashville. I remember attending a dinner of of about a dozen folks who spoke at the conference. I was grateful to get to chat with so many folks whose talks I’d attended.

Presenting talks and tutorials

I presented my first conference tutorial at PyCon 2016 in Portland and my first talk at DjangoCon US 2016 in Philadelphia. I had been presenting lightning talks every few months at my local Python and JavaScript meetups for a few years by then and I had hosted free workshops at my local meetup and paid workshops for training clients.

Having presented locally helped, but presenting on a big stage is always scary.

Volunteering

I volunteered at some of my first few conferences and found that I really enjoyed it. I especially enjoyed running the registration desk, as you’re often the first helpful face that people see coming into the conference.

During PyCon 2016, 2017, and 2018, I co-chaired the open spaces thanks to Anna Ossowski inviting me to help. I had first attended open spaces during PyCon 2015 and I loved them. Talks are great, but so are discussions!

I also ran for the PSF board of directors in 2016 and ended up serving on the board for a few years before stepping down. After my board terms, I volunteered for the PSF Code of Conduct working group for about 6 years. I didn’t even know what the PSF was until PyCon 2015!

A lot of travel… maybe too much

After DjangoCon 2016, I went a bit conference-wild. I attended PyTennessee 2017, PyCaribbean 2017 in Puerto Rico, PyCon US 2017 in Portland, PyCon Australia 2017 in Melbourne, DjangoCon 2017 in Spokane, PyGotham 2017 in NYC, and North Bay Python 2017 in Petaluma.

In 2018 I sponsored PyTennessee and PyOhio and spoke at both. I passed out chocolate chip cookies at PyTennessee as a way to announce the launch of Python Morsels. I also attended PyCon 2018 in Cleveland, DjangoCon 2018 in San Diego, PyGotham 2018, and North Bay Python 2018.

I slowed down a bit in 2019, with just PyCascades (Seattle), PyCon US (Cleveland), PyCon Australia (Sydney), and DjangoCon US (San Diego, which is home for me).

Since the pandemic

Since the start of the pandemic, I’ve attended PyCon US 2022, DjangoCon 2022 in San Diego (in my city for the third time!) and PyCon US 2023. Traveling is more challenging for me than it used to be, but I hope to attend more regional conferences again soon.

Between client work, I’ve been focusing less on conferences and more on blog posts (over here), screencasts, my weekly Python tips emails, and (of course) on Python Morsels.

My journey started locally

I became part of the Python community before I knew I was part of it.

I started using Python professionally in December 2009 and I attended my first San Diego Python meetup in March 2012. I met the organizers, gave some lightning talks, attended Saturday study group sessions (thanks Carol Willing, Alain Domissy, and others for running these), and volunteered to help organize meetups, study groups, and workshops.

By 2014, I had learned from folks online and in-person and I had helped out at my local Python meetup. I had even made a few contributions to some small Django packages I relied on heavily.

I was encouraged to attend PyCon 2014 by others who were attending (thanks Carol, Micah, and Paul among others). The conference was well-worth the occasional feeling of overwhelm.

We’re all just people

The biggest thing I’ve repeatedly learned over the past decade of Python conferences is that we’re all just people.

Carol Willing keynoted PyCon US 2023. But I met Carol as a kind Python user in San Diego who started the first Python study group meetings in Pangea Bakery on Convoy Street.

Jay Miller will be keynoting PyCon US 2024. But I met Jay as an attendee of the Python study group, who was enthusiastic about both learning and teaching others.

My partner, Melanie Arbor, keynoted DjangoCon 2022 along with Jay Miller. When I met Melanie, she was new to Python and was very eager to both learn and help others.

David Lord has made a huge impact on the maintenance of Flask and other Pallets projects. I met David as a Python study group attendee who was an enthusiastic StackOverflow contributor.

I learned a ton from Brandon Rhodes, Ned Batchelder, Russell Keith-Magee, and many others from online videos, forums, and open source projects before I ever met them. But each of them are also just Python-loving people like the rest of us. Russell gives good hugs, Ned is an organizer of his local Python meetup, and Brandon wears the same brand of shoes as me.

We all have people we’ve learned from, we suffer from feelings of inadequacy, we get grumpy sometimes, and we care about the Python language and community in big and small ways.

What’s next for you?

Will you attend a local meetup? Or will you attend an online social event?

If so, consider asking the organize if you can present a 5 minute lightning talk at a future event. As I noted in a DjangoCon 2016 lightning talk, lightning talks are a great way to connect with folks.

Will you attend a Python conference one day? See having a great first PyCon when/if you do.

Remember that we’re all just people though. Some may have a bit more experience (whether at speaking, contributing to open source, or something else), but we’re just people.

This year’s foss-north was the tenth incarnation. I’ve been organizing foss-gbg since 2013, and foss-north since 2016 (two events in 2020 makes it ten in total). It’s been quite a journey – moving between three venues, working with amazing speakers and sponsors, finding a way through the pandemic, while getting to know so many people.

The conference continued when fscons moved from town. Henrik, who helped start fscons has been invaluable during the foss-north years.

Over the years, there has been multiple people helping out with things like announcing speakers, manning the registration booth, finding speakers and creating a program. One of the people who has been around the whole time is Tobias, who is ran a large portion of the show this year and is taking over the lead organizer role.

Private life has been rough over the past two years, so the decision to step back from foss-north has been more or less inevitable. So it’s a great feeling to be able to sit down and enjoy the show and know that the event is in good hands with Tobias.

Thank you all for speaking, visiting, helping out at, and sponsoring foss-north. See you at next year’s event. I’ll have more time to mingle than ever before! ;-)

Last week I attended KDE’s joint sprint on accessibility, sustainability and automation hosted at MBition in Berlin. Having had little opportunity to sit down and discuss things since Akademy 2023 and the KF6 release the scope grew even wider in the end, my notes below only cover a small subset of topics.

Sustainability

I was mainly involved regarding the energy measurement CI tooling here:

• Resolved some problems with measurement runs getting stuck while running standard usage scenarios.
• Set up VNC remote access to debug and resolve similar issues more easily in the future.
• Identified issues in the measurement data processing and reporting pipeline.

There was also some discussion around “sustainable” or “ethical” “AI”. While its pretty clear that open source implementations are strictly preferable over proprietary ones and that locally runnable systems are strictly preferable to hosted ones things get a lot more muddy when it comes to the licensing of the input data.

This boils down to the question to what extend we consider the output data derivative work of the input data. Besides the current legal interpretation (which I’d expect to be subject to change), this is also about how we see this regarding the spirit of share-alike licenses (xGPL, CC-BY-SA, etc).

Accessibility

Overall the most effort here probably went into learning and understanding the internals of the accessibility infrastructure in Qt, and exploring ways how we could make non-trivial things possible with that, something that should pay off going forward.

But there were also some immediate results:

• Submitted a patch to Qt that should make interactive ItemDelegate instance in lists or combo boxes accessible by default. Those inherit from AbstractButton but have their accessibility role changed which makes them lose the default interaction handling at the moment.
• Made the time picker actually accessible and match how similar controls are represented e.g. by Firefox (MR).
• The date picker (while seemingly a very similar control conceptually) proved much harder, but David eventually found a solution for this as well (MR).

Automation

With the AT-SPI accessibility interface also being used for our test automation tooling all of the above also helps here.

• Implemented the missing plural version of finding elements of sub-elements in the AT-SPI Selenium driver (MR).
• Integrated Selenium tests for Itinerary, which then also already found the first bug (MR).

Improvements to monitoring the overall CI status also had some immediate effects:

• K3b, KImageMapEditor and Kirigami Gallery were switched to Qt 6 exclusively, having been identified as already ported.
• poxml (an essential part of the documentation localization toolchain) was identified as not having been ported to Qt 6 yet, which meanwhile has been corrected.
• Unit test failures in kcalutils and messagelib were fixed, allowing to enforce passing unit tests in those repositories.
• Global CI monitoring also helped to identify gaps in CI seed jobs and pointed us to a Qt 6.7 regression affecting ECM, all of which was subsequently fixed.

Other topics

I also got the chance to look at details of the Akademy 2024 venue with David and Tobias (who are familiar with the building), to improve the existing OSM indoor mapping. Having that data for a venue opens new possibilities for conference companion apps, let’s see what we can get implemented in Kongress until September.

Indoor map of the Akademy 2024 venue with routing and event-specific MapCSS stylesheet.

As Nate has reported already we didn’t stay strictly on topic. More discussions I was involved in included:

• Sharing code and components between Itinerary, KTrip and NeoChat. Some initial changes in that general direction have meanwhile been integrated.
• The implications of sunsetting QCA.
• Changes to the release process, product groupings and release frequencies.

You can help!

Getting a bunch of contributors into the same room for a few days is immensely valuable and productive. Being able to do that depends on people or organizations offering suitable venues and organizing such events, as well as on donations to cover the costs of travel and accommodation.

We all know that tools like ChatGPT have really empowered developers to tackle bigger problems. Are you using TailwindCSS and need a login page? Try asking Chat "What is the HTML for a login page with the login username, password, and button in its own section in the center of the page?" It will literally give you a first pass version of it. But how far can you push this? Fred Tubiermont may have taken it farther than most. He built a functioning SaaS product with paying customers by only using ChatGPT and Python. It's fascinating to hear his story.<br/> <br/> <strong>Episode sponsors</strong><br/> <br/> <a href='https://talkpython.fm/mailtrap'>Mailtrap</a><br> <a href='https://talkpython.fm/training'>Talk Python Courses</a><br/> <br/> <strong>Links from the show</strong><br/> <br/> <div><b>Frederick Tubiermont</b>: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/fredericktubiermont/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">linkedin.com</a><br/> <b>The #1 AI Jingle Generator</b>: <a href="https://www.aijinglemaker.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">aijinglemaker.com</a><br/> <b>Fred's YouTube Channel</b>: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@callmefred" target="_blank" rel="noopener">youtube.com</a><br/> <b>AI Coding Club</b>: <a href="https://aicodingclub.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">aicodingclub.com</a><br/> <b>No Code</b>: <a href="https://www.saashub.com/best-no-code-software" target="_blank" rel="noopener">saashub.com</a><br/> <b>Prompt Engineering 101 - Crash Course & Tips</b>: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOm75o2Z5-o" target="_blank" rel="noopener">youtube.com</a><br/> <b>gpt-engineer</b>: <a href="https://github.com/gpt-engineer-org/gpt-engineer" target="_blank" rel="noopener">github.com</a><br/> <b>Instant Deployments, Effortless Scale</b>: <a href="https://railway.app" target="_blank" rel="noopener">railway.app</a><br/> <b>Self-hosting with superpowers.</b>: <a href="https://coolify.io" target="_blank" rel="noopener">coolify.io</a><br/> <b>The newsletter platform built for growth.</b>: <a href="https://www.beehiiv.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">beehiiv.com</a><br/> <b>Watch this episode on YouTube</b>: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbX3B04sS1s" target="_blank" rel="noopener">youtube.com</a><br/> <b>Episode transcripts</b>: <a href="https://talkpython.fm/episodes/transcript/459/i-built-a-python-saas-with-ai" target="_blank" rel="noopener">talkpython.fm</a><br/> <br/> <b>--- Stay in touch with us ---</b><br/> <b>Subscribe to us on YouTube</b>: <a href="https://talkpython.fm/youtube" target="_blank" rel="noopener">youtube.com</a><br/> <b>Follow Talk Python on Mastodon</b>: <a href="https://fosstodon.org/web/@talkpython" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><i class="fa-brands fa-mastodon"></i>talkpython</a><br/> <b>Follow Michael on Mastodon</b>: <a href="https://fosstodon.org/web/@mkennedy" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><i class="fa-brands fa-mastodon"></i>mkennedy</a><br/></div>

New Features

On System Settings’ Region & Language page, you can now choose how you’d like storage sizes to be displayed. This means you can change them to the more common MB and GB style, instead of MiB and GiB, for example. Note that the default value has not changed, but you have the option to change it yourself (Méven Car, Plasma 6.1. Link):

The popular Kirigami.ContextualHelpButton component now has a QtWidgets counterpart: KContextualHelpButton! (Felix Ernst, Frameworks 6.2. Link)

UI Improvements

On X11, Spectacle now makes it obvious that screen recording isn’t supported when you try to run it in recording mode using a global shortcut (Noah Davis, Spectacle 24.05. Link)

Plasma’s Vaults widget now appears visible in the active part of the system tray only when a Vault is actually open, bringing the System Tray closer to its platonic ideal of only showing things that are contextually relevant (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Apps inhibiting sleep and screen locking are now shown by their pretty names, not their technical names (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.1. Link):

Adopted the new frameless message header style in Discover, as seen when there’s a distro upgrade available (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 6.1. Link):

Bug Fixes

Kate once again works as expected with multiple virtual desktops, opening files in a new window in the current virtual desktop rather than attaching it to an existing instance in a different virtual desktop (Christoph Cullmann, Kate 24.05. Link)

Fixed Spectacle’s multi-monitor screenshots on X11 not working either at all, or well (Vlad Zahorodnii, and Noah Davis, Plasma 6.0.5. and Spectacle 24.05. Link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a semi-common crash in System Monitor when switching to the Applications page (Arjen Hiemstra, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

When updating the system using Discover, there are no longer gaps in the updates list as items complete and disappear (Ivan Tkachenko, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

Plasma’s feature to remember whether Bluetooth was on or off last time now works more reliably (Someone going by the pseudonym “Arctic Lampyrid”, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

Fixed an issue in Plasma that would cause flickering and stuttering with adaptive sync turned on (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

Floating panels now de-float when a window reaches the correct distance away from them, as opposed to de-floating too early (Yifan Zhu, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

Fixed multiple issues involved with LPD printer discovery and queue management (Mike Noe, Plasma 6.1. Link)

When you have multiple Brightness and Color widgets (for example, because you have multiple panels each with a System Tray on it), the Night Light portions of the widgets no longer interfere with one another and interact in strange ways (Natalie Clarius, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Other bug information of note:

• 3 Very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 39 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 38 last week). Current list of bugs
• 116 KDE bugs of all kinds fixed over the last week Full list of bugs

Performance & Technical

Improved Spectacle-s startup speed on Wayland (Noah Davis, Spectacle 24.05. Link)

Improved the scrolling performance of long scrollable views in Discover. This is an area of focus, so expect more to come soon (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, Plasma 6.0.5. Link)

Reduced visual glitchiness when the GPU does a reset, which can happen due to driver bugs, or, with NVIDIA, when the system goes to sleep (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 6.1. Link)

Implemented support for the org.freedesktop.impl.portal.Secret portal for KWallet, which lets Flatpak apps use it (Nicolas Fella, Frameworks 6.2. Link)

Automation & Systematization

Added some basic GUI tests for Dolphin (Méven Car, link)

Added basic GUI tests for opening Plasma’s Alternate Calendar config page (Fushan Wen, link)

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org, where you can find more news from other KDE contributors.

How You Can Help

The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and labor have helped to bring it there! But as we grow, it’s going to be equally important that this stream of labor be made sustainable, which primarily means paying for it. Right now the vast majority of KDE runs on labor not paid for by KDE e.V. (the nonprofit foundation behind KDE, of which I am a board member), and that’s a problem. We’ve taken steps to change this with paid technical contractors—but those steps are small due to growing but still limited financial resources. If you’d like to help change that, consider donating today!

Otherwise, visit https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved to discover other ways to be part of a project that really matters. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE; you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to already be a programmer, either. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

Are you new to the world of Drupal, eager to dive into its powerful capabilities, but encountering obstacles in the form of outdated tutorials and confusing documentation? You're not alone. Beginning your Drupal journey can feel like navigating uncharted territory, leaving many feeling frustrated before they even begin.

Version 0.0.17 of RcppSpdlog arrived on CRAN overnight following and has been uploaded to Debian. RcppSpdlog bundles spdlog, a wonderful header-only C++ logging library with all the bells and whistles you would want that was written by Gabi Melman, and also includes fmt by Victor Zverovich. You can learn more at the nice package documention site.

This releases updates the code to the version 1.14 of spdlog which was release yesterday.

The NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in RcppSpdlog version 0.0.17 (2024-04-25)

• Minor continuous integration update

• Upgraded to upstream release spdlog 1.14.0

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report. More detailed information is on the RcppSpdlog page, or the package documention site. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

This post was supposed to be called “death with bcachefs”, but it sounded a bit too dramatic. :-) Evidently bcachefs-tools in Debian is finally getting an update (although in experimental), so that's good. Meanwhile, one of my multi-device filesystems died a horrible death, and since I had backups, I didn't ask for its fix to be prioritized—fsck still is unable to repair it and I don't use bcachefs on that machine anymore. But the other one still lives fairly happily.

Hanging around #bcachefs on IRC tells me that indeed, this thing is still quite experimental. Some of the killer features (like proper compression) don't perform as well as they should yet. Large rewrites are still happening. People are still reporting quite weird bugs that are being triaged and mostly fixed (although if you can't reproduce them, you're pretty much hosed). But it's a fun ride. Again: Have backups. They saved me. :-)

Last month, we announced that depending on readiness of the codebase to 11.0.0 beta requirements today on April 26, 2024, Drupal 11 would be released either on the week of July 29, 2024 or the week of December 9, 2024.

The Drupal 11 codebase progressed a lot since then, it is based on Symfony 7 and jQuery 4, and the deprecated APIs have been removed. However, while we are making rapid progress on PHPUnit 10 support, we need to fully complete that update to PHPUnit 10 before a beta release, which will not quite be ready for next week.

To help the community prepare for Drupal 11, we decided to make Drupal 11.0.0-alpha1 available next week (on the week of April 29, 2024), alongside Drupal 10.3.0-beta1. This also means that those attending DrupalCon Portland 2024 the week after can already try out the first tagged version of Drupal 11, and modules can add Drupal 11 compatibility confident that all runtime APIs are stable.

We are giving ourselves an additional couple of weeks to run down the last PHPUnit 10 issues and any other remaining beta blockers ready for a stable Drupal 11.0.0 release on the week of July 29, 2024. Assuming all goes well, we'll make a final decision by May 10th and release a beta shortly afterwards.

As your Python project grows, you typically organize your code in modules and packages for easier maintenance and reusability. When you do that, you’ll likely notice the sudden emergence of a __pycache__ folder alongside your original files, popping up in various locations unexpectedly.

[ Improve Your Python With 🐍 Python Tricks 💌 – Get a short & sweet Python Trick delivered to your inbox every couple of days. >> Click here to learn more and see examples ]

How do you verify and validate the data coming into your Python web application? What tools and security best practices should you consider as a developer? Christopher Trudeau is back on the show this week, bringing another batch of PyCoder's Weekly articles and projects.

[ Improve Your Python With 🐍 Python Tricks 💌 – Get a short & sweet Python Trick delivered to your inbox every couple of days. >> Click here to learn more and see examples ]

It’s been around 6 months since the GNOME Foundation was joined by our new Executive Director, Holly Million, and the board and I wanted to update members on the Foundation’s current status and some exciting upcoming changes.

Finances

As you may be aware, the GNOME Foundation has operated at a deficit (nonprofit speak for a loss – ie spending more than we’ve been raising each year) for over three years, essentially running the Foundation on reserves from some substantial donations received 4-5 years ago. The Foundation has a reserves policy which specifies a minimum amount of money we have to keep in our accounts. This is so that if there is a significant interruption to our usual income, we can preserve our core operations while we work on new funding sources. We’ve now “hit the buffers” of this reserves policy, meaning the Board can’t approve any more deficit budgets – to keep spending at the same level we must increase our income.

One of the board’s top priorities in hiring Holly was therefore her experience in communications and fundraising, and building broader and more diverse support for our mission and work. Her goals since joining – as well as building her familiarity with the community and project – have been to set up better financial controls and reporting, develop a strategic plan, and start fundraising. You may have noticed the Foundation being more cautious with spending this year, because Holly prepared a break-even budget for the Board to approve in October, so that we can steady the ship while we prepare and launch our new fundraising initiatives.

Strategy & Fundraising

The biggest prerequisite for fundraising is a clear strategy – we need to explain what we’re doing and why it’s important, and use that to convince people to support our plans. I’m very pleased to report that Holly has been working hard on this and meeting with many stakeholders across the community, and has prepared a detailed and insightful five year strategic plan. The plan defines the areas where the Foundation will prioritise, develop and fund initiatives to support and grow the GNOME project and community. The board has approved a draft version of this plan, and over the coming weeks Holly and the Foundation team will be sharing this plan and running a consultation process to gather feedback input from GNOME foundation and community members.

In parallel, Holly has been working on a fundraising plan to stabilise the Foundation, growing our revenue and ability to deliver on these plans. We will be launching a variety of fundraising activities over the coming months, including a development fund for people to directly support GNOME development, working with professional grant writers and managers to apply for government and private foundation funding opportunities, and building better communications to explain the importance of our work to corporate and individual donors.

Board Development

Another observation that Holly had since joining was that we had, by general nonprofit standards, a very small board of just 7 directors. While we do have some committees which have (very much appreciated!) volunteers from outside the board, our officers are usually appointed from within the board, and many board members end up serving on multiple committees and wearing several hats. It also means the number of perspectives on the board is limited and less representative of the diverse contributors and users that make up the GNOME community.

Holly has been working with the board and the governance committee to reduce how much we ask from individual board members, and improve representation from the community within the Foundation’s governance. Firstly, the board has decided to increase its size from 7 to 9 members, effective from the upcoming elections this May & June, allowing more voices to be heard within the board discussions. After that, we’re going to be working on opening up the board to more participants, creating non-voting officer seats to represent certain regions or interests from across the community, and take part in committees and board meetings. These new non-voting roles are likely to be appointed with some kind of application process, and we’ll share details about these roles and how to be considered for them as we refine our plans over the coming year.

Elections

We’re really excited to develop and share these plans and increase the ways that people can get involved in shaping the Foundation’s strategy and how we raise and spend money to support and grow the GNOME community. This brings me to my final point, which is that we’re in the run up to the annual board elections which take place in the run up to GUADEC. Because of the expansion of the board, and four directors coming to the end of their terms, we’ll be electing 6 seats this election. It’s really important to Holly and the board that we use this opportunity to bring some new voices to the table, leading by example in growing and better representing our community.

Allan wrote in the past about what the board does and what’s expected from directors. As you can see we’re working hard on reducing what we ask from each individual board member by increasing the number of directors, and bringing additional members in to committees and non-voting roles. If you’re interested in seeing more diverse backgrounds and perspectives represented on the board, I would strongly encourage you consider standing for election and reach out to a board member to discuss their experience.

Thanks for reading! Until next time.

Best Wishes,
Rob
President, GNOME Foundation

(also posted to GNOME Discourse, please head there if you have any questions or comments)

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-17.

AI isn’t useless. But is it worth it?

Tags: tech, ai, gpt, copilot, criticism, work

It is an interesting essay. It leans on the side of “assistants are useful for simple coding tasks” and it’s a bit more critical when it’s about writing. The stance is original I find, yes it can help with some writing tasks, but if you look at the writing tasks you can expedite this way… if you wish to expedite them isn’t it a sign that they were providing little value in the first place? Is the solution the assistant or changing the way you work? Indeed this might hide some busy work otherwise.

https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/

Magic Numbers | blarg

Tags: tech, networking, history

Interesting facts about how the ethernet frame MTU came to be 1500 bytes.

https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2024/04/24/magic-numbers/

Guiding users away from cd and ls :: Terminal Click — Bringing Dead Text to Life

Tags: tech, command-line, terminal

Interesting ideas for terminal emulators and shells. Maybe will make their way in other software.

https://terminal.click/posts/2024/04/guiding-users-away-from-cd-and-ls/

Tips on Adding JSON Output to Your CLI App - Brazil’s Blog

Tags: tech, json, command-line

Nice set of advices. There are interesting things to do on the command line with more JSON output. It needs to be easy to work with though.

https://blog.kellybrazil.com/2021/12/03/tips-on-adding-json-output-to-your-cli-app/

Modern Linux mounts a lot of different types of virtual filesystems

Tags: tech, linux, filesystem

There is indeed a jungle of virtual filesystems nowadays. That doesn’t make it easy to filter only for the “real” ones.

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/LinuxManyVirtualFilesystems

Shared libs, rpath and the runtime linker

Tags: tech, system, linux, linking, debugging

This can sometimes be confusing. Here are a couple of tips about debugging rpath and linker errors.

https://carlosrdrz.dev/shared-libs-rpath-and-the-runtime-linker

Coverage Guided Fuzzing - Extending Instrumentation to Hunt Down Bugs Faster! - Include Security Research Blog

Tags: tech, tests, security, fuzzing

Maybe a bit dry, but gives a good idea of how a fuzz testing harness works. And also how it can be tweaked.

https://blog.includesecurity.com/2024/04/coverage-guided-fuzzing-extending-instrumentation/

HTML attributes vs DOM properties - JakeArchibald.com

Tags: tech, html, web, frontend

There are differences between attributes on the HTML side and properties on the DOM side. This can quickly get confusing, here is a good reference for it.

https://jakearchibald.com/2024/attributes-vs-properties/

3 important things I overlooked during code reviews | Piglei

Tags: tech, codereview, programming

Indeed, naming, comments and communication styles are three aspects often overlooked during reviews. They are very important though and shouldn’t be neglected.

https://www.piglei.com/articles/3-important-things-I-overlooked-during-cr/

First Come First Served: The Impact of File Position on Code Review

Tags: tech, codereview, cognition

I guess we kind of suspected it, this studies tends to prove it. Defects are more easily found in the first files of a code review rather than in the last ones.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.04259

Random musings on the Agile Manifesto – NeoPragma LLC

Tags: tech, agile, criticism

Interesting musings indeed. That’s lesser heard opinions about the manifesto and its origins. Good food for thought.

https://neopragma.com/2024/04/random-musings-on-the-agile-manifesto/

Calculus Made Easy

Tags: mathematics, learning

I didn’t know this book. It is written in a surprising style, but it’s very much down to earth and to the point. For sure a good way to learn calculus.

https://calculusmadeeasy.org/

You Are What You Read, Even If You Don’t Always Remember It - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

Tags: reading, knowledge

Very good point. You might not remember the content, but if it impacted the way you think it did its job.

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2024/you-are-what-you-read/

Bye for now!