Series: My open source process
Articles about the process I use for developing my open source projects.
How to cheat at unit tests with pytest and Black
I’ve been making a lot of progress on Datasette Cloud this week. As an application that provides private hosted Datasette instances (initially targeted at data journalists and newsrooms) the majority of the code I’ve written deals with permissions: allowing people to form teams, invite team members, promote and demote team administrators and suchlike.
[... 933 words]Open source projects: consider running office hours
Back in December I decided to try something new for my Datasette open source project: Datasette Office Hours. The idea is simple: anyone can book a 25 minute conversation with me on a Friday to talk about the project. I’m interested in talking to people who are using Datasette, or who are considering using it, or who just want to have a chat.
[... 786 words]How to build, test and publish an open source Python library
At PyGotham this year I presented a ten minute workshop on how to package up a new open source Python library and publish it to the Python Package Index. Here is the video and accompanying notes, which should make sense even without watching the talk.
[... 2,055 words]How I build a feature
I’m maintaining a lot of different projects at the moment. I thought it would be useful to describe the process I use for adding a new feature to one of them, using the new sqlite-utils create-database command as an example.
[... 2,850 words]Writing better release notes
Release notes are an important part of the open source process. I’ve been thinking about these a lot recently, and I’ve assembled some thoughts on how to do a better job with them.
[... 918 words]Software engineering practices
Gergely Orosz started a Twitter conversation asking about recommended “software engineering practices” for development teams.
[... 1,557 words]Automating screenshots for the Datasette documentation using shot-scraper
I released shot-scraper back in March as a tool for keeping screenshots in documentation up-to-date.
[... 1,810 words]The Perfect Commit
For the last few years I’ve been trying to center my work around creating what I consider to be the Perfect Commit. This is a single commit that contains all of the following:
[... 2,061 words]Coping strategies for the serial project hoarder
I gave a talk at DjangoCon US 2022 in San Diego last month about productivity on personal projects, titled “Massively increase your productivity on personal projects with comprehensive documentation and automated tests”.
[... 3,865 words]Things I’ve learned about building CLI tools in Python
I build a lot of command-line tools in Python. It’s become my favorite way of quickly turning a piece of code into something I can use myself and package up for other people to use too.
[... 1,235 words]Publish Python packages to PyPI with a python-lib cookiecutter template and GitHub Actions
I use cookiecutter to start almost all of my Python projects. It helps me quickly generate a skeleton of a project with my preferred directory structure and configured tools.
[... 686 words]A selfish personal argument for releasing code as Open Source
I’m the guest for the most recent episode of the Real Python podcast with Christopher Bailey, talking about Using LLMs for Python Development. We covered a lot of other topics as well—most notably my relationship with Open Source development over the years.
[... 464 words]