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Localization vs Internationalization Internationalization is the process of making your software easy to adapt to different languages or regions. Internationalization is often abbreviated by i18n. In a website, i18n can mean to use Babel projects (e.g. flask-babel in Python, gettext in PHP, FormatJS in JavaScript, …) Localization is the process of adapting your … Read More »

Safe vs Secure When I hear “safety” in the context of software development, I’m always reminded that I need to automate my backup solution. The potential harm most software developers have to deal with is luckily only data loss due to hardware failures. Safety is resilience against accidential harm to people, property … Read More »

How Twitter’s Image Choice is Biase Photo by Ravi Sharma on Unsplash Twitter shows preview-images of shared images. If the aspect ratio is not the wanted one, the image needs to be cropped for the preview. The way the cropping is done is supposedly not random. People seem to think that it is “smart” in the … Read More »

How to write Flake8 plugins 😍 Really important parts of code reviews are almost impossible to automate: Architectural decisions and logical bugs. They are too customized to your codebase; too specific for the pull request. However, many comments in code reviews are not like that. They are about simply style decisions, common minor mistakes, and misconceptions … Read More »

Client vs Customer Photo by You X Ventures on Unsplash A customer is somebody who buys goods, e.g. in a supermarket. Or somebody who buys services like at a hairdresser. A client uses professional advisors and services. Accountants, architects, attorneys, consultants, and sex workers have clients. Read More »

Logging Basics in Python The dmesg output. Screenshot taken by Martin Thoma. Logging is the act of recording information about the current state of execution. It’s typically done for two purposes: Debugging: To enable the developer to narrow down the cause of a system failure Monitoring: To enable people on operations to know … Read More »

Pre-commit hooks pre-commit hooks are a mechanism of the version control system git. They let you execute code right before the commit. Confusingly, there is also a Python package called pre-commit which allows you to create and use pre-commit hooks with a way simpler interface. The Python package has a plugin-system to … Read More »

Pytest Plugins to Love ❤️ Plugins can modify and extend a lot of aspects of pylint, including how the output is done Pytest is extensible and has plenty of plugins. You don’t need to use any of them, but you might find some very useful. I love this because you have an easy time … Read More »

How I moved a library from Python 2 to 3 Image by skylarvision from needpix.com Last year I’ve given a workshop about packaging Python projects. One of the participants was a bioinformatics researcher. She needed advice because she wanted to switch from Python 2 to Python 3, but a library she needed was only available for Python 2 … Read More »

Static Code Analysis for Python Static code analysis looks at the code without executing it. It is usually extremely fast to execute, requires little effort to add to your workflow, and can uncover common mistakes. The only downside is that it is not tailored towards your code. In this article, you will learn how to … Read More »