When we do production deployments at my team at Canonical, we log into a bastion server and execute a long running command from there. Long running as of 30 minutes. The script goes through all our servers and deploys the latest changes. Ne…
Today, I looked something up in our documentation, and noticed an unformatted link. This is reStructuredText - a file format for structured data. While many people have switched to MarkDown, which is unarguably easier to read and write, I s…
When you execute git commit on the command line, your specified editor opens and you can create an expressive title and a longer description. You are probably also aware of the shortcut git commit -m , which skips the step with the editor.
Working with branches is fine, as long as you are able to work on one only, or at least have the time to wrap up your work and commit some self-contained and complete state before switching to the next branch. If you cannot complete your wo…
Have you ever thought how cool it would be to contribute to it? Python, or more specifically CPython as the reference implementation of the Python programming language is called, is an open source project like any other - nothing magical. W…
Today I saw a Tweet by Marius Gedminas, who wrote about lfs, a replacement for df. It is one of the many tools, implemented in Rust, which offer some more features compared to their bash alternatives. When I tried to install it, I just saw
Today I wanted to check how the UPDATE statement was used in already deleted SQL patch files. Usually I do a git log -p and then use the interactive search in less via /, but in this case there were too many hits from Python files, so I wan…
Last year I wrote a blog post about how to migrate away from Bazaar, a distributed version control system, originally developed by Canonical, to git. While I still think this is the only way forward, here, at Canonical, working in the Launc…
Today I was about setting up a test case for parsing a YAML file which is templated with Jinja variables. My Pydantic model, which uses yaml.safe_load under the hood to load the above configuration, returned the URL, even before the value g…
“This is horrifying. But also not surprising.” These are the words of a friend of mine, a security specialist, when I told him what I found out today. Most applications nowadays use open source libraries, especially for common functionality…
While I certainly heard of Conda, Miniconda, and Anaconda before, I only had a vague idea of these terms and what is behind them. So, let’s get the terminology straight. Conda is a CLI application which does package, dependency and environm…
Today I was extending an argparse based CLI application. I wanted to add an optional argument so that I can pass in environment variables. For this argparse has a special “action”, called append. From the argparse documentation: Now I can a…