Month summary — April 2022

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head for headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.

From automating builds and releases to taking care of large-scale regression testing, here are a few ways we use GitHub Actions to build GitHub.

The Hexagonal or Ports and Adapters Architecture, is not the silver bullet for all applications. It involves a certain level of complexity, that when handled with care, will bring great benefits to your system. But if broken windows are allowed, it might cause a lot of headaches.

In this post I reflect on our progress so far, and some of the interesting challenges we are facing while building the BBC’s critical digital services.

Nice bash / zsh config explained. Source files are on gh: justinabrahms/jlilly-bashy-dotfiles

Exit interviews are a trap. Unless you know you’re immune, don’t walk into the trap.

I’ve been using Github for a very long time now, and along the way I’ve been gathering a step-by-step guide on creating the perfect Github repository. If you haven’t guessed already, this article is an enhanced version of that guide.

Writing is key to have impact in large organizations. As a senior software engineer chances are that writing is the most important skill you have to acquire in order to increase your scope beyond the team and advance your career.

How do we convince people that in programming simplicity and clarity – in short: what mathematicians call “elegance” – are not a dispensable luxury, but a crucial matter that decides between success and failure?”

― Edsger W. Dijkstra, “Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective”, p347.

Sometimes you need to write a Python class that provides multiple ways to construct objects. In other words, you want a class that implements multiple constructors. This kind of class comes in handy when you need to create instances using different types or numbers of arguments. Having the tools to provide multiple constructors will help you write flexible classes that can adapt to changing needs.

In this Pydon’t I show you why refactoring is important and show you how to do it in little steps, so that it doesn’t become too overwhelming.

It’s all too easy to forget to pass a variable to your template, or make a typo in a variable name. Unfortunately, it can be quite hard to debug such mistakes, since Django’s default behaviour is to ignore the problem and render an empty string.

In most Django code, you do not need to use get_user_model(), and you can instead use a vanilla import.

List of blogs about Django and related technologies.

In this article, we’ll look at how to assign permissions to users and groups in order to authorize them to perform specific actions.

Asynchronous event dispatching/handling library for FastAPI and Starlette

‘structlog’ makes logging in Python faster, less painful, and more powerful by adding structure to your log entries.

bpython is a lightweight Python interpreter that adds several features common to IDEs. These features include syntax highlighting, expected parameter list, auto-indentation, and autocompletion.

A GitHub Action for detecting vulnerable dependencies in your PRs.

A set of GitHub actions for checking your projects for vulnerabilities

A syntax-highlighting pager for git, diff, and grep output

Dedicated Game Server Hosting and Scaling for Multiplayer Games on Kubernetes.

Bootstrap Kubernetes the hard way on Google Cloud Platform. No scripts.

Run exclusively by Ivaylo Durmonski and supported by Library members, the goal of this site is simple: Rigorous production of easily digestible writing to save people from drowning in chaotic information.

Generation of diagram and flowchart from text in a similar manner as markdown.

No code is the best way to write secure and reliable applications. Write nothing; deploy nowhere.