I have released NColony 17.9.0, available in a PyPI near you.

New this version:

• CalVer
• Python 3 support!
• You can ask to, explicitly, inherit environment variables from the monitoring process.
• Website

Thanks to Mark Williams for reviewing many pull requests.

(Thanks to Donald Stufft for reviewing this post, and to Glyph Lefkowitz for inspiring much of it.)

(JP Calderone wrote a Twisted version of this approach.)

It is often the case that after creating an EC2 instance in AWS, the next step is SSHing. This might be because the machine …

With the news about MS Paint going away from the default MS install, it might be timely to look at other ways to edit images. The most common edit I need to do is to crop images -- and this is what we will use as an example.

My favorite image …

Docker, in recent versions, has introduced multi-stage build. This allows separating the build environment from the runtime envrionment much more easily than before.

In order to demonstrate this, we will write a minimal Flask app and run it with Twisted using its WSGI support.

The Flask application itself is the …

(Thanks to Aahz, Roy Williams, Yarko Tymciurak, and Naomi Ceder for feedback. Any mistakes that remain are mine alone.)

In the post about building Docker applications, I had the following Python script:

import datetime, subprocess
tag = datetime.datetime.utcnow().isoformat()
tag = tag.replace(':', '-').replace('.', '-')
for ext in ['', '-slim']:
    image = "moshez …

(Thanks to Mark Williams for feedback and research)

Imagine the following code:

## mymodule.py
import toplevel.nextlevel.lowmodule

def _func():
    toplevel.nextlevel.lowmodule.dosomething(1)

def main():
    _func()

Assuming the toplevel.nextlevel.module does define a function dosomething, this code seems to work just fine.

However, imagine that later we …

PEP 441 resulted in the creation of the zipapp module. The PEP says "Python has had the ability to execute directories or ZIP-format archives as scripts since version 2.6 [...] This feature is not as popular as it should be mainly because it was not promoted as part of Python …

Many projects and organizations have a coding standard. For Python, much of the time, the standard is a variant of PEP 8. During code reviews, often the reviewer will point out where the code disagrees with the standard, and ask for it to be fixed. Sometimes, if the reviewer is …

Learning about Python Method Resolution Order with Twilight Sparkle and her friends.

(Thanks to Ashwini Oruganti for her helpful suggestions.)

The show "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" is the latest reimagination of the "My Little Pony" brand as a TV show. The show takes place, mostly, in Ponyville and …

(Thanks to Tim D. Smith and Augie Fackler for reviewing a draft. Any mistakes that remain are mine.)

The environment variable PYTHONPATH seems harmless enough. The official documentation refers to its function as "Augment the default search path for module files." However, in practice, setting this variable in a shell …