Running Modules
(Thanks to Paul Ganssle for his suggestions and improvements. All mistakes that remain are mine.)
When exposing a Python program as a command-line application,
there are several ways to get the Python code to run.
The oldest way,
and the one people usually learn in tutorials,
is to run
python …
Random Bites of Pi(e)
In today's edition of Pi day post, we will imagine we have a pie. (If you lack imagination, go out and get a pie.) (Even if you do not lack imagination, go out and get a pie.)
As is traditional, we got a round pie. Since pies are important, we …
read moreThe Python Toolbox
I have written before about Python tooling. However, as all software, things have changed -- and I wanted to write a new post, with my current understanding of best practices.
Testing
As of now, pytest
has achieved official victory.
Unless there are overwhelming reasons to use something else,
strongly consider using …
Jupyter for SRE
Jupyter is a tool that came out of the data science community. In science, being able to replicate experiments is of the utmost importance -- so a tool where you can "show your work" is helpful. However, being able to show your work -- have colleagues validate what you have done, repeat …
read moreWrite Python like an expert
Ten tricks to level up your Python.
Trick 0 -- KISS
Experts know about the weird dark corners of Python -- but do not use them in production code. The first tip is remembering that while Python has some interesting corners, they are best avoided in production code.
Make your code as …
Interesting text encodings (and the people who love them)
(Thanks to Tom Prince and Nelson Elhage for suggestions for improvement.)
Nowadays, almost all text will be encoded in UTF-8 -- for good reasons, it is a well thought out encoding. Some of it will be in Latin 1, AKA ISO-8859-1, which is popular in the western world. Less of it …
read moreExploration Driven Development
"It's ok to mess up your own room."
Sometime there is a problem where the design is obvious -- at least to you. Maybe it's simple. Maybe you've solved one like that many times. In those cases, just go ahead -- use Test-Driven-Development, lint your code as you're writing, and push a …
read moreAbstraction Cascade
(This is an adaptation of part of the talk Kurt Rose and I gave at PyBay 2017)
An abstraction cascade is a common anti-pattern in legacy system. It is useful to understand how to recognize it, how it tends to come about, how to fix it -- and most importantly, what …
read moreGather
Gather is a plugin framework -- and it now has its own blog.
Use it! If you like it, tell us about it, and if there is a problem, tell us about that.
read moreBrute Forcing AES
Thanks to Paul Kehrer for reviewing! Any mistakes or oversights that are left are my responsibility.
AES's maximum key size is 256 bits (there are also 128 and 192 bit versions available). Is that enough? Well, if there is a cryptographic flaw in AES (i.e., a way to recover …
read more