10 items tagged “lukeplant”
2024
Programming mantras are proverbs (via) I like this idea from Luke Plant that the best way to think about mantras like "Don’t Repeat Yourself" is to think of them as proverbs that can be accompanied by an equal and opposite proverb.
DRY, "Don't Repeat Yourself" matches with WET, "Write Everything Twice".
Proverbs as tools for thinking, not laws to be followed.
Enforcing conventions in Django projects with introspection (via) Luke Plant shows how to use the Django system checks framework to introspect models on startup and warn if a DateTime or Date model field has been added that doesn’t conform to a specific naming convention.
Luke also proposes “*_at” as a convention for DateTimes, contrasting with “*_on” or “*_date” (I prefer the latter) for Dates.
Python packaging must be getting better—a datapoint (via) Luke Plant reports on a recent project he developed on Linux using a requirements.txt file and some complex binary dependencies—Qt5 and VTK—and when he tried to run it on Windows... it worked! No modifications required.
I think Python’s packaging system has never been more effective... provided you know how to use it. The learning curve is still too high, which I think accounts for the bulk of complaints about it today.
2023
You can stop using user-scalable=no and maximum-scale=1 in viewport meta tags now. Luke Plant points out that your meta viewport tag should stick to just “width=device-width, initial-scale=1” these days—the user-scalable=no and maximum-scale=1 attributes are no longer necessary, and have a negative impact on accessibility, especially for Android users.
The different uses of Python type hints (via) Luke Plant describes five different categories for how Python optional types are being used today: IDE assistants, type checking, runtime behavior changes via introspection (e.g. Pydantic), code documentation, compiler instructions (ala mypyc)—and a bonus sixth, dependency injection.
Python’s “Disappointing” Superpowers. Luke Plant provides a fascinating detailed list of Python libraries that use dynamic meta-programming tricks in interesting ways—including SQLAlchemy, Django, Werkzeug, pytest and more.
pyfakefs usage (via) New to me pytest fixture library that provides a really easy way to mock Python’s filesystem functions—open(), os.path.listdir() and so on—so a test can run against a fake set of files. This looks incredibly useful.
2021
YAGNI exceptions (via) Luke Plant provides his collection of things that you probably ARE going to need in a project, where adding them later is painful enough that it’s worth the up-front investment. I really like these as a concept, and I’m coining the term PAGNI—for Probably Are Gonna Need It—to describe them.
2009
Django ponies: Proposals for Django 1.2
I’ve decided to step up my involvement in Django development in the run-up to Django 1.2, so I’m currently going through several years worth of accumulated pony requests figuring out which ones are worth advocating for. I’m also ensuring I have the code to back them up—my innocent AutoEscaping proposal a few years ago resulted in an enormous amount of work by Malcolm and I don’t think he’d appreciate a repeat performance.
[... 1,674 words]2008
Changeset 8162. “Implemented a secure password reset form that uses a token and prompts user for new password”—also sneaks base36 encoding and decoding in to Django.