Posts

I finally got a secretary. Not a real one, alas, but still. Ever since I can remember I’ve wanted one. First mostly because my dad had one, and to the five-year-old me he was of course the most powerful man in the world. If I had a secretary, I’d be powerful too, and that would make him proud. Easy! When I got older this understanding shifted to finding the idea of a secretary extremely practical. Imagine not having to think of hard-to-remember stuff, like names and birthdays. ...

I embarked on my quest to Pantsify (as we call it in my team) our quite large monorepo in juli 2024. I’ve made some notes along the way; this is my Pants journey. Let me save you some time: Pants is brilliant if you keep close enough to the paved Python road. You can even walk in the grass next to it, but don’t go too far because you’ll need to learn new spells. Pants is still worth it forces a single way of working, and allows you to run all validations constantly and repeatably; because it knows what hasn’t changed and therefore can be skipped. ...

I recently had a colleague who suggested it might be a good idea to test our Python software against older versions of Python. And at first I was like: Yeah, good idea! It’s good practice, right? Support a whole range of versions! We see that all the time in the packages we fetch from Pypi. Supporting more versions is just good stewardship, right? But we were walking into a trap. We were discussing our own software, that we run, ourselves, in Kubernetes. We control the environment, all the way from development to production. There is simply nowhere where we don’t explicitly decide what Python version to use. On top of that most of that software is technically scripts, not installable packages. ...

TLDR; Colors aren’t values. Yes, as a human you can quickly see what’s up, and that’s great if it’s automatically formatted, I’m all for that. But colorizing a line or cell by hand is possibly the slowest action you can do in a spreadsheet. And yet I see people doing it all the time! Do me a favor, and look at your keyboard. Take one finger and color a cell. Nope, you can’t. There are, however, 26 letters and 10 numbers, right there. No hotkeys, just dedicated buttons, just for those! ...

“No, I don’t use tool X. I do it manually with tool Y, because then I’ll have more grip on what’s happening.” Examples of this are: using git on the command line instead of a GUI using vim instead of an extensive IDE like IntelliJ or VSCode Yes, you’ll understand the lower level part of the problem you’re solving better. But logically this must cost brainpower, otherwise there wouldn’t be more understanding. However, no matter how smart you are, brainpower is a finite resource. ...