Greetings, friend!
This one is a bit unusual and direct result of my announcement of the TIL section on my homepage. A success story, if you will.
Since instituting the section at the end of August, I’ve posted a total of 9 posts. Not bad, given I was 3 weeks on a vacation. One of them – which being surprisingly non-standard – even making it on front page of the Orange Site and pulling in some sweet vitriol in the wholesome tradition of shooting the messenger. Overall, it’s great though, because it makes me write more and you never know where that leads.
In this case it lead right here. After months and years of being frustrated with Codecov getting flakier and flakier and causing broken builds, I finally took the plunge and researched how to ditch it for Python projects using GitHub Actions-only means. The result was a popular TIL post that on a second sight is way too long and thorough to be just TIL. So, I’ve decided to “promote” it to a proper blog post, warranting to appear on my proper RSS feeds and – of course – this proper newsletter. I’m still trying to figure out how to treat the TIL section exactly and I’m happy to hear your thoughts on this!
Anyhow, here it is: How to Ditch Codecov for Python Projects
I hope it helps you to take away some frustration from Open Source maintenance as it did for me!
Tidbits
Appearances
As announced in the last newsletter, I’ve travelled to Amersfoort to attend my first in-person gathering since DevOps Pro 2019 in Moscow. It was delightful to see people in-person, even though it was limited in size. And spending a few days in rural Netherlands was also a very nice change of pace.
On my way back, it was KLM’s 102nd birthday which was in a way heartbreaking, because my last KLM trip before the pandemic was on their 100th birthday.
Exciting challenges indeed.
I don’t know where Omikron will take us, but I suspect smaller events like this have better chances to actually happen and I’m pondering if it even makes sense to put in the effort and submit a talk to PyCon US 2022.
Let’s all hope the best. I for one am happily boosted and encourage you to do the same, if possible.
TIL
Since my last newsletter, there’s been a bunch of new TILs beside the promoted one:
- which is not POSIX: The venerable
whichcommand is not part of any standard and it’s features vary across platforms. And that although I’ve been using it since the 1990s! I’ve looked at the alternatives that are. - SONOS Shares Its Mesh: My overpriced WiFi router died and my SONOS soundbar took over as a Wi-Fi bridge; much to my befuddlement.
- Template Links in Sphinx: This one didn’t spark a lot of interest, but if you ever need to template links in your Sphinx docs (in my example: a link with the package version), it’s waiting here for you.
- You Can Stop Updating Copyright Attribution Years: Just in time for the end of the year! Save yourself the pointless annual tradition of updating the year. Don’t believe me – believe overpaid big tech lawyers!
FOSS
Lately, I’ve been quite prolific on the FOSS front after a few months of sloth & guilt. Most notably:
- doc2dash! I’ve started – but never completed – a rewrite in Go, but mostly it just worked. Now my hand was forced to release a new version so I’ve polished up a few things and added new intersphinx types. If you still have 20 browser tabs open with API reference, check it out!
- A handful of structlog releases that I’ve moved to flit and cog and that I will blog about in the future – if there’s interest.
- I have extracted the pure CFFI bindings from argon2-cffi into a separate project called argon2-cffi-bindings to simplify maintenance of both. That sounds boring, but a direct benefit of that is a boatload of new binary wheels – including for M1 Macs and Alpine Linux.
- attrs is closing in on a huge release. So huge, that I’m fear-procrastinating on it. There’s already a lot of new stuff inside (more than 80 commits!) and I’m determined to ship it with
import attrsthis year. Stay tuned!
Stay healthy and merry, and talk to you in a hopefully better 2022!
Best,
—h