Since December, several of my open source packages have been “lifted” on Tidelift. This means that Tidelift are paying me a portion of their subscription fee for continued, standardized maintenance of these packages. These funds are very appreciated, so thanks to Tidelift subscribers 🫡.
Different filesystems have different case sensitivity, for example:
Here are some potential mistakes made with Django settings that you can avoid.
Here are some Django-related deals for this year’s Black Friday (25th Nov) and Cyber Monday (28th Nov), including my own. For more deals on general Python-related products, see Trey Hunner’s post.
Python 3.11 only made one change to unittest, but it’s a good one: context manager methods. These methods can simplify setup and teardown logic in many cases, such as dynamic use of unittest.mock.
Many Git commands output “advice”, with hints about which commands you could run next. Most notably, git status gives you advice for what to do about files in each state:
There you are, minding your own business, rebasing your branch and… surprise! A merge conflict!
Sometimes error reporting loses details, and you don’t know where an error message comes from. In such cases, I have often found that the fastest way to track down the source is to search through the project and its virtualenv.
pre-commit uses Git’s hook system to run tools when you commit. Unfortunately, Git doesn’t run any hooks when making a commit during a rebase. This can lead to you rebasing a branch and not realizing some code needs fixing, at least not until your CI system runs pre-commit (say, with pre-commit.ci).
Have you ever accidentally committed a bunch of junk created by your OS, like Thumbs.db files from Windows, or .DS_Store files from macOS? Or, have you joined a project, and for one of your first commits, added rules to the .gitignore file for your text editor’s project files? If so, this post is for you! You can avoid such pain or busywork by making a global ignore file.
Imagine you’re part way through making some changes, and you realize that you need to rebase or merge. You can:
Take this code, which prints a shruggy man:
To errr is human, to undo computer can help.
You started a new branch, worked hard on initial commits, and you’re ready to send it for review. You try to push and:
Git hosts offer a “squash merge” option that merges a reviewed branch by combining all its commits into one. This leads to a linear Git history on your main branch, which is easier to understand and refer back to code reviews.
The Git community is gradually moving the default branch name from “master” to “main”, because the term “master” is hurtful to some people as it refers to slavery.
By default, if you mistype a Git command, it will list similar commands that you might have meant:
I just released version 1.11.0 of django-upgrade, a tool for automatically upgrading your Django project code. This release contains a lot of new features and fixes, thanks to new contributors including those at the Djangocon Europe sprints. Let’s look at the top changes.
Sometimes code uses boolean checks on variables that can only be true. This is normally a sign of a mistake, either in the type hints or the implementation. Mypy has an optional check that can find such problematic boolean usage with its truthy-bool error code.
You can use git rev-parse to show the SHA of the current Git commit:
In a lecture titled Where Does Bad Code Come From?, Casey Muratori introduced the acronym WARMED for categorizing the costs of code:
The Django 4.1 release notes feature this short, innocent-looking note:
pre-commit’s main mode of operation is to run hooks against changed files when you commit. But you can also run hooks without committing, using pre-commit run.
The original type hint proposal, PEP 484, initially allowed implicit optional types in function signatures. That is, a parameter with a default value of None would have its type automatically interpreted as optional. For example, this signature:
As type hints have evolved, Python has added simpler, more succinct syntaxes. But you still need to know the older forms, since Mypy uses them when reporting types.