Blogs about Python

This is my user manual. If we are working together (or planning to), please read it carefully. You will learn how to deal with me productively and avoid misunderstandings. I initially wrote this for my …

Astral made a huge summer splash in the Python community last week when they released uv 0.3.0. What is uv? uv is a Python package manager written in rust that has just gained the ability …

OpenAI (who owns ChatGPT) released a new model today. It is called o1. The main difference between models like 4o is it inherently performs chain of thought reasoning when producing an answer. What is chain …

"Get or create" is a very common operation for syncing data in the database, but implementing it correctly may be trickier than you may expect. If you ever had to implement it in a real …

Whenever I publish something about my Python Docker workflows, I invariably get challenged about whether it makes sense to use virtual environments in Docker containers. As always, it’s a trade-off, and I err on the …

I recently encountered an open source project that hadn't received updates for a while. The issue tracker had ~200 open issues, ~70 open pull requests, and CI was partially failing. It's not uncommon for projects …

This article outlines the steps I follow to prepare my technical talks, including notes on slide design, engaging with the audience, how to prepare the delivery, and how to manage the Q&A. How I prepare …

Signalling allows for applications to be decoupled by allowing designated receivers to be informed when an action has taken place (the signal). Flask and Quart both utilise the excellent Blinker library to support signals and …

Link: https://tenacity.readthedocs.io/en/latest/When writing code or tests in Python, one issue I had was when the code would fail due to random things like network issues or external peripherals not responding in time. Just rerunning the …

(One of my summaries of the Dutch PyUtrecht meetup in Utrecht, NL). Parenting and coding: choices have an effect. What is the outcome of your work? How does it turn out? But in the end …

In modern app development, user experience is paramount. Gone are the days when a simple loader at the center of the screen sufficed. Today, users expect more refined loading indicators, with shimmer animations being popular. …

Gemini 1.5 Flash-8B is now production ready Gemini 1.5 Flash-8B is "a smaller and faster variant of 1.5 Flash" - and is now released to production, at half the price of the 1.5 Flash model. …

I maintain a GitHub Action called check-for-changed-files. For the purpose of this blog post what the action does isn't important, but the fact that I authored it originally in TypeScript is. See, one day I …

There’s a concept that I’ve heard called by a lot of different names, but my favorite name for it is “the Highlander problem”, which refers to the catchphrase of the campy-yet-still-quite-fun Highlander movie/TV franchise. In …

I recently got my hands on a USB drive with Kakasoft USB Copy Protection (DRM protection). This software promises to let you share data without the fear of it being copied by the end user. …