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Brian #1: Ten tasty ingredients for a delicious pull request

• on wagtail blog, from LB
• Great tips for helping out with open source projects.
• But even for closed source, there’s good stuff there to know for people transitioning to single person projects to working on a team.
• The tips
  • Read the [development] instructions. The contributing guide, etc.
  • Read the issue and comments
  • Create a fresh branch for your contribution
  • Keep the changes focused
  • Write unit tests
    • also, extending tests for untested or under-tested features are a great way to contributes
  • Give your pull request a name with context
  • Reference the issue being fixed or resolved in the pull request
  • Review & fix the CI failures
  • Push to the same branch with fixes and do not open a new pull request
  • Be patient. (Article lists this as “Eagerness balanced with patience”).

Michael #2: textX

• via Rhet Turnbull
• textX is a meta-language for building Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) in Python. It is inspired by Xtext.
• In a nutshell, textX will help you build your textual language in an easy way. You can invent your own language or build a support for already existing textual language or file format.
• From a single language description (grammar), textX will build a parser and a meta-model (a.k.a. abstract syntax) for the language

Brian #3: Reasoning about asyncio.Semaphore

• Guido van Rossum
• Article uses a fast food restaurant analogy to reason about concurrency, asyncio, locks, and semaphores.
• A lock is like a single table restaurant with buzzers handed out to people waiting.
• A semaphore is like the same thing but with more than one table.
• Great discussion of the complexities of the Semaphore implementation.
• Also of concurrency.
• But almost as important, it’s an excellent example of utilizing a fairly easy to visualize analogy to reason about a complex problem. It also hits parts of the problem difficult to fit into the analogy, and pragmatically abandons the analogy when necessary.

Michael #4: Turnstile

• A user-friendly, privacy-preserving alternative to CAPTCHA
• I created a Python library based on Pydantic to validate the forms: turnstile.py (should I make this proper package and GitHub repo?)

Extras

Brian:

• Choosing a place to host your Python application.
  • aka Heroku Alternatives for Python-based Applications
• Kicking around the idea of starting cohort based pytest training, possibly starting mid Dec.
  • Please let me know if you think this is a good idea and you might be interested.
  • message me @brianokken

Michael:

• Cppfront project aims to modernize C++
• New pyscript (will cover in more depth soon)
• NextDNS follow up
  • https://nextdns.io/
  • Yes, it’s basically PiHole in the Cloud with tons of options
  • Currently outdoing my NordVPN protections
  • Try with https://adblock-tester.com
  • Had to manually set DNS-over-HTTPS in Vivaldi to work with VPN
  • Add additional blocking lists
• Got a Feather ESP32-S2 and put CircuitPython on it

Joke: Getting help with code