TIL stands for today I learned and is my place for collecting small, practical nuggets that I just learned – or explained to someone – and thought they’re too useful to let them vanish in the ethers of Twitter or GitHub comments. Please see the blog post announcing this section for details.
They have their own RSS feed and I toot / tweet whenever I publish.
GitHub has this cool feature where while opening a pull request one can allow the maintainers to push changes to that branch. This is a lot more ergonomic than suggesting larger-scale edits in the insufferably slow GitHub web UI. But it does require setting up remotes and upstream branches correctly.
→ Read moreIt turns out that VS Code can move symbols between Python modules – but it’s hiding the feature behind the “Quick Fix…” context menu.
→ Read moreI’m absolutely in love with my GL.iNet GL-MT3000 (Beryl AX), but occasionally, it has trouble connecting to captive portal Wi-Fis.
→ Read moreFor years, I’ve had a macOS bug that occurred randomly and that I could only fix by rebooting or logging out. The Internet is full of similar problems, but I never found a solution to mine, and my pleas for help on Twitter went unanswered. Now, I have found a workaround myself.
→ Read moreI’m a big fan of bat as a cat replacement, and I’m an even bigger fan of just as a Make replacement. Sadly, bat doesn’t (and won’t) support Justfile syntax. But you can add it yourself with a little extra effort.
→ Read moreI love my Apple silicon computer, but having to manually switch to Rosetta-enabled shells for my Intel-only projects was a bummer.
→ Read moreIf you have a GitHub Actions workflow that sets an output using echo ::set-output key=value, you have started to see an unhelpful deprecation warning. Here’s how to fix it.
Contrary to popular belief, it’s possible to ship portable executables of Python applications without sending your users to Python packaging hell.
→ Read moreGitHub has the concept of co-authors of a commit. You’ve probably seen it in the web UI, when multiple people are listed to have committed something. I want to be gracious with credit where it’s due and I’ve found ways to make it easier.
→ Read morepip-tools is ready for modern packaging.
→ Read moreIf you reuse a @pytest.mark.parametrize many times, it might be time to define a parametrized fixture instead.
Don’t buy it.
→ Read moreHow to seamlessly support typing.Protocol on Python versions older and newer than 3.8. At the same time.
Every January 1st, an army of open source developers rushes out to update their copyright attributions in licenses and documentation. Why? Because we’ve always done it that way.
→ Read moreOne of my pet peeves are projects without easily accessible changelogs (secondary pet peeve: changelogs without dates). Currently, I’m moving most auxiliary docs to Markdown, because that’s clearly what GitHub and related tooling wants me to. But I don’t want to compromise on my own pet peeve.
→ Read moreThe fact that SONOS devices build a transparent Wi-Fi mesh once one of them has wired Internet, is one of the main features of the ecosystem. TIL that at least the Playbar happily shares that mesh with your other devices.
→ Read moreI learn a non-trivial number of things, because there’s Debian drama about them. The fact that the which command is not part of any standard just joined the flock.
In my day job I spend a lot of time dealing with sketchy TLS setups. The error messages provided by OpenSSL tend to be quite opaque – fortunately there’s tools to help you.
→ Read moreOn UNIX-like operating systems you can have the Python equivalent of node_modules today, for every Python version, without changing your workflows.
Wanting to update all dependencies in a way that it doesn’t break is somewhat more complicated than expected.
→ Read moreDue to fork() semantics, using RQ on macOS can lead to confusing crashes.