February 2018
46 posts: 24 links, 7 quotes, 15 beats
Feb. 16, 2018
Feb. 20, 2018
Python & Async Simplified. Andrew Godwin: “Python’s async framework is actually relatively simple when you treat it at face value, but a lot of tutorials and documentation discuss it in minute implementation detail, so I wanted to make a higher-level overview that deliberately ignores some of the small facts and focuses on the practicalities of writing projects that mix both kinds of code.” This is really useful: clearly explains the two separate worlds of Python (sync and async functions) and describes Andrew’s clever sync_to_async and async_to_sync decorators as well.
Moving a large and old codebase to Python3 (via) Really interesting case study full of good ideas. The codebase in this case was 240,000 lines of Python and Django written over the course of 15 years. The team used Python-Modernize to aid their transition to a six-compatible codebase first.
Feb. 21, 2018
Photos from our tour of the amazing bone collection of Ray Bandar. Ray Bandar (1927-2017) was an artist, scientist, naturalist and an incredibly prolific collector of bones. His collection is in the process of moving to the California Academy of Sciences but Natalie managed to land us a private tour lead by his great nephew. The collection is truly awe-inspiring, and a testament to an extraordinary life lived following a very particular passion.
Andrew Godwin’s www-router Docker container (via) Really clever Docker trick: a container that runs Nginx and uses it to route traffic to other containers based on the hostname—but the hostnames to be routed are configured using environment variables which the run-nginx.py CMD script uses to dynamically construct an nginx config when the container starts.
A Promenade of PyTorch. Useful overview of the PyTorch machine learning library from Facebook AI Research described as “a Python library enabling GPU-accelerated tensor computation”. Similar to TensorFlow, but where TensorFlow requires you to explicitly construct an execution graph PyTorch instead lets you write regular Python code (if statements, for loops etc) which PyTorch then uses to construct the execution graph for you.
s3monkey: A Python library that allows you to interact with Amazon S3 Buckets as if they are your local filesystem. (via) A particularly devious hack by Kenneth Reitz—provides a context manager within which various Python filesystem APIs such as open() and os.listdir() are monkeypatched to operate against an S3 bucket instead. Kenneth built it to make it easier to work with files from apps running on Heroku. Under the hood it uses pyfakefs, a filesystem mocking library originally released by Google.
Feb. 22, 2018
I’ve Just Launched “Pwned Passwords” V2 With Half a Billion Passwords for Download (via) Troy Hunt has collected 501,636,842 passwords from a wide collection of major breaches. He suggests using the to build a password strength checker that can say “your password has been used by 53,274 other people”. The full collection is available as a list of SHA1 codes (brute-force reversible but at least slightly obfuscated) in an 8GB file or as an API. Where things get really clever is the API design: you send just the first 5 characters of the SHA1 hash of the user’s password and the API responds with the full list of several hundred hashes that match that prefix. This lets you build a checking feature without sharing full passwords with a remote service, if you don’t want to host the full 8GB of data yourself.
Feb. 23, 2018
GitHub: Weak cryptographic standards removal notice. GitHub deprecated TLSv1 and TLSv1.1 yesterday. I like how they handled the deprecation: they disabled the protocols for one hour on February 8th in order to (hopefully) warm people by triggering errors in automated processes, then disabled them completely a couple of weeks later.
I am pleased to inform all of you that there is a notorious black market maple syrup seller and he looks exactly like the image you get in your head when someone first says the phrase “a notorious black market maple syrup seller” to you.
github-trending-repos (via) This is a really clever hack: Vitaliy Potapov built a system for subscribing to a weekly digest of trending GitHub repos in your favourite languages entirely on top of the existing GitHub issues notification system. Find the issue for your particular language and hit “subscribe” and you’ll get an email (or push notification depending on how you get your issue notifications) once a week with the latest trends. The implementation is a 220 line Node.js script which runs on a daily and weekly schedule using Circle CI, so Vitaliy doesn’t even have to host or pay for any of the underlying infrastructure. It’s brilliant.
Feb. 25, 2018
Publishing history has various examples of advertising-only business models. But they are very much the exception. They mainly exist when there are near monopoly barriers to entry into the market which allow publishers to command and defend robust ad rates.
kennethreitz/requests-html: HTML Parsing for Humans™ (via) Neat and tiny wrapper around requests, lxml and html2text that provides a Kenneth Reitz grade API design for intuitively fetching and scraping web pages. The inclusion of html2text means you can use a CSS selector to select a specific HTML element and then convert that to the equivalent markdown in a one-liner.
r1chardj0n3s/parse: Parse strings using a specification based on the Python format() syntax. (via) Really neat API design: parse() behaves almost exactly in the opposite way to Python’s built-in format(), so you can use format strings as an alternative to regular expressions for extracting specific data from a string.
Feb. 26, 2018
By far the most important lesson I took out of this game is that whenever there's behavior that needs to be repeated around to multiple types of entities, it's better to default to copypasting it than to abstracting/generalizing it too early.
This is a very very hard thing to do in practice. As programmers we're sort of wired to see repetition and want to get rid of it as fast as possible, but I've found that that impulse generally creates more problems than it solves. The main problem it creates is that early generalizations are often wrong, and when a generalization is wrong it ossifies the structure of the code around it in a way that is harder to fix and change than if it wasn't there in the first place.
— SSYGEN
Feb. 27, 2018
Responsive Components: a Solution to the Container Queries Problem (via) Philip Walton uses Chrome’s new ResizeObserver API (best described as document.onresize for elements, currently a W3C Editor’s Draft, not yet supported by other browsers) to implement a media-query style mechanism for applying CSS based on the size of the parent container. This is really clever. In the absence of ResizeObserver (which can be polyfilled) it can fall back to showing the narrowest design, which is probably best for mobile anyway. Desktop browsers are better equipped to run the polyfill.