One of the items of feedback I got from the article about interface immutability is that it did not give any concrete feedback for how to design interfaces. Given that they are forever, it would be good to have some sort of guidance.

The first item is that you want …

(The following talks about zope.interface interfaces, but applies equally well to Java interfaces, Go interfaces, and probably other similar constructs.)

When we write a function, we can sometimes change it in backwards-compatible ways. For example, we can loosen the type of a variable. We can restrict the type of …

The Stack Overflow Survey Results for 2019 are in! There is some official analysis, that mentioned some things that mattered to me, and some that did not. I decided to dig into the data and see if I can find some things that would potentially interest my readership.

import csv …

I am the parent of two young kids. It is easy to sink into random stuff, and not follow up on goals. Strict time management and prioritization means I get to work on open source projects, write programming books and update my blog with a decent cadence. Since a lot …

A while ago, I decided I wanted to self-publish a book on improving your Python skills. It was supposed to be short, sweet, and fairly inexpensive.

The journey was a success, but had some interesting twists along the way.

From the beginning, I knew what technology I wanted to write …

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a shared state in possession of mutability, must be in want of a bug." -- with apologies to Jane Austen

As Ms. Austen, and Henrik Eichenhardt, taught us, shared mutable state is the root of all evil.

Yet, the official documentation of functools tells …

There is a lot of code that overloads the __call__ method. This is the method that "calling" an object activates: something(x, y, z) will call something.__call__(x, y, z) if something is a member of a Python-defined class.

At first, like every operator overload, this seems like a …

A couple of months ago, a successful attack against the Node ecosystem resulted in stealing an undisclosed amount of bitcoins from CoPay wallets.

The technical flow of the attack is well-summarized by the NPM blog post. Quick summary:

1. nodemon, a popular way to run Node applications, depends on event-stream.
2. The …

JSON is a useful format. It might not be ideal for hand-editing, but it does have the benefit that it can be hand-edited, and it is easy enough to manipulate programmatically.

For this reason, it is likely that at some point or another, checking in a JSON file into your …

If you want to speak to me, 1-on-1, about anything, I want to be able to help. I am a busy person. I have commitments. But I will make the time to talk to you.