"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 …

(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 …

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.

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 …

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 …