Virtual environments can be kind of cryptic to people who haven't worked with Python for a while. I'd say that even for people that do work with Python, it can take a long time for it to "click". The short version is, you want one virtual environment for every Python project you work on, which, if you work on a lot of smaller projects, can get annoying.

It's fairly common for generally useful CLI tools to be written in Python. Some examples off the top of my head are ranger, streamlink, youtube-dl and glances.

Multi-stage builds can help reduce your Docker image sizes in production. This has many benefits: Development dependencies may potentially expose extra security holes in your system (I've yet to see this happen, but why not be cautious if it's easy to be so?), but mostly by reducing image size you make it faster for others to docker pull it.

Sometimes, you want to run a subprocess with Python and stream/print its output live to the calling process' terminal, and at the same time save the output to a variable. Here's how:

Of all the languages I've worked with, Python is one of the most annoying to work with when it comes to managing dependencies - only Go annoys me more. The industry standard is to keep a strict list of your dependencies (and their dependencies) in a requirements.txt file. Handily, this can be auto-generated with pip freeze > requirements.txt.

3 years ago I wrote about Russell, a static site/blog generator I wrote. Since then, I've had a major rewrite of the project to make it easier to extend and configure.

Setting up logging in a sane way in Django has been surprisingly difficult due to some confusing setting names and the annoying way Django's default logging setup looks like. Here I'll go through some simple steps you can take to gain full control of your logging setup, without too many changes to a standard Django setup.

In this post, I'll show you how to effectively override Flask's url_for function in order to add a timestamp to static asset URLs, as well as setting up Nginx to serve cache busted URLs.

TLDR: Symlink /path/to/virtualenv/bin/my-script to a directory in your $PATH, such as ~/.local/bin/my-script

Over the weekend I had a fun little project - writing a tiny static HTML blog generator.