August 2019
Aug. 1, 2019
PyPI now supports uploading via API token (via) All of my open source Python libraries are set up to automatically deploy new tagged releases as PyPI packages using Circle CI or Travis, but I’ve always get a bit uncomfortable about sharing my PyPI password with those CI platforms to get this to work. PyPI just added scopes authentication tokens, which means I can issue a token that’s only allowed to upload a specific project and see an audit log of when that token was last used.
Aug. 3, 2019
Documentation needs to include and be structured around its four different functions: tutorials, how-to guides, explanation and technical reference. Each of them requires a distinct mode of writing. People working with software need these four different kinds of documentation at different times, in different circumstances - so software usually needs them all.
Logs vs. metrics: a false dichotomy (via) Nick Stenning discusses the differences between logs and metrics: most notably that metrics can be derived from logs but logs cannot be reconstituted starting with time-series metrics.
Aug. 4, 2019
Working with many-to-many relationships in sqlite-utils (via) I just released sqlite-utils 1.9 with syntactic sugar support for creating many-to-many relationships for records stored in SQLite databases.
Aug. 5, 2019
Optimizing for the mobile web: Moving from Angular to Preact. Grubhub reduced their mobile web load times from 9-11s to 3-4s by replacing Angular with Preact (and replacing other libraries such as lodash with native JavaScript code). The conversion took 6 months and involved running Angular and Preact simultaneously during the transition—not a huge additional overhead as Preact itself is only 4KB. They used TypeScript throughout and credit it with providing a great deal of confidence and productivity to the overall refactoring.
This is when I pull out “we don’t do that here.” It is a conversation ender. If you are the newcomer and someone who has been around a long time says “we don’t do that here”, it is hard to argue. This sentence doesn’t push my morality on anyone. If they want to do whatever it is elsewhere, I’m not telling them not to. I’m just cluing them into the local culture and values.
Aug. 7, 2019
OPP (Other People’s Problems) (via) Camille Fournier provides a comprehensive guide to picking your battles: in a large organization how can you navigate the enormous array of problems you can see that you’d like to fix, especially when so many of those problems aren’t directly in your area of control?
Aug. 9, 2019
Y'all decided you could send 6x as much script because the high-end could take it...but the next billion users can't. There might have been budget for 2x, but not 6x. Not by a long shot.
Aug. 15, 2019
Subsume JSON a.k.a. JSON ⊂ ECMAScript (via) TIL that JSON isn’t a subset of ECMAScript after all! “In ES2018, ECMAScript string literals couldn’t contain unescaped U+2028 LINE SEPARATOR and U+2029 PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR characters, because they are considered to be line terminators even in that context.”