PEP 750 introduced t-strings for Python 3.14. In fact, they are so new that as of Python 3.14.0b1 there still isn't any documentation yet for t-strings. 😅 As such, this blog post will hopefully help explain what exactly t-strings are and what you might use them for by| Tall, Snarky Canadian
There are a couple of things I always want to be true when I install Python packages for a project: I have a virtual environment Pip is up-to-date For virtual environments, you would like them to be created as fast as possible and (usually) with the newest version of Python.| Tall, Snarky Canadian
Back in October, I released mousebender 2023.2. The biggest change was adding support for PEP 714 (which unless you're running a package index you don't need to know about it). The other small thing was adding ProjectFileDetails as a union of typed dicts to make| Tall, Snarky Canadian
In the summer of 2022, my partner was taking her machine learning course as part of UBC's Key Capabilities in Data Science certificate. I was Andrea's on-call tutor for any Python questions, so while Andrea was listening to lectures I decided to do a small project| Tall, Snarky Canadian
In my blog post explaining how virtual environments work, I announced my project called microvenv. At the time, my only goal was to create a package which could create virtual environments in a minimal, fast way. But since then, I have expanded the API of the package to provide some| Tall, Snarky Canadian
I was talking with someone about how Andrea and I have been consciously taking less flights since the pandemic started in order to lower our carbon footprint (Take the Jump suggests a flight under 1500km every 3 years, longer than that every 8 years; heard about this from David Suzuki| Tall, Snarky Canadian
Since people seemed to like my June 2023 post on the state of WASI support for CPython, I thought I would do one for another one of my other long-gestating projects: coming up with a standardized lock file format for Python packaging. 💡 When I say "lock file"| Tall, Snarky Canadian
I normally don't talk about politics here, but as I write this the US has started a trade war with Canada (which is partially paused for a month, but that doesn't remove the threat). It is so infuriating and upsetting that I will be skipping PyCon US entirely for the| Tall, Snarky Canadian
"In computer science, syntactic sugar is syntax within a programming language that is designed to make things easier to read or to express. It makes the language "sweeter" for human use: things can be expressed more clearly, more concisely, or in an alternative style that some may prefer." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_sugar| Tall, Snarky Canadian
When I was about to go on paternity leave, the Gleam programming language reached 1.0. It's such a small language that I was able to learn it over the span of two days. I tried to use it to convert a GitHub Action from JavaScript to Gleam, but I| Tall, Snarky Canadian
In the past week I had two people separately tell me what they thought the PSF Conduct WG did and both were wrong (and incidentally in the same way). As such, I wanted to clarify what exactly the WG does for people in case others also misunderstand what the group| Tall, Snarky Canadian
In my opinion, you should only introduce a named tuple to your code when you're updating a preexisting API that was already returning a tuple or you are wrapping a tuple return value from another API. Let's start with when you should use named tuples. Usually an API that returns| Tall, Snarky Canadian
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 tried to update the NPM dependencies. Unfortunately, that update broke everything in a really bad| Tall, Snarky Canadian
After signing up for GitHub Sponsors, I had a nagging feeling that somehow asking for money from other people to support my open source work was inappropriate. But after much reflection, I realized that phrasing the use of GitHub Sponsors as a way to express patronage/support and appreciation for| Tall, Snarky Canadian
The biggest update since June 2023 is WASI is now a tier 2 platform for CPython! This means that the main branch of CPython should never be broken more than 24 hours for WASI and that a release will be blocked if WASI support is broken. This only applies to| Tall, Snarky Canadian
Back in June, I proposed a struct syntax for Python. I shared the post on Mastodon and got some feedback. Afterwards I thought about what I heard and talked it over with some folks. I've now coded up a proof-of-concept to share to get some more feedback from people to| Tall, Snarky Canadian
Story time When I go on vacation with a fellow Python developer, inevitably I will talk about Python. 😁 Back in September, Andrea and I drove the Cabot Trail with our friends Dusty and Jen, which led to a discussion about the match statement and how Dusty and I both wished| Tall, Snarky Canadian
In my post on unravelling the global statement, I mentioned how after my PyCascades 2023 talk some people came up to me about a couple of pieces of Python syntax that I had not managed to unravel. Beyond global, people thought I should be able to get rid of the| Tall, Snarky Canadian
While preparing my talk for PyCascades 2023 on this very blog post series of Python's syntactic sugar, I had an inkling that I could unravel the global statement. After talking to some folks after my talk, I realized that I could, in fact, unravel it! The trick was realizing what| Tall, Snarky Canadian
After needing to do a deep dive on the venv module (which I will explain later in this blog post as to why), I thought I would explain how virtual environments work to help demystify them. Why do virtual environments exist? Back in my the day, there was no concept| Tall, Snarky Canadian
Like many people in the programming industry, I work from home. And as such, I do not get up from my desk as much as I probably should as my office space is pretty comfortable. Unfortunately, this has led to my upper back getting a bit tight from slouching forward| Tall, Snarky Canadian
When talking about WebAssembly, one of the things that often confuses people is the lack of a great analogy for the various platform targets that WebAssembly supports. This ends up being a bit important as it dictates whether your WebAssembly code will (not) work with another bit as it all| Tall, Snarky Canadian
As part of my series on Python's syntactic sugar, I initially skipped tackling assignment expressions because I made them more complicated than I needed to in my head. 😅 But there is some key subtlety to unravelling them which may not be obvious. Let's start with a simple example of an| Tall, Snarky Canadian
