Coding Notes

Ubuntu Mate 22.04 on Thinkpad T470

Time to celebrate, today Ubuntu 23.04 is officially available, so time for a blog entry. For Ubuntu Mate users, not much news, except for some cosmetics and AI-generated wallpapers. I am writing this while using Ubuntu Mate 22.04. Some issues I had on my Thinkpad T470 with dual-boot with Windows 10. In the end, some complaints about Linux in general.

Is string formatting in Python safe to use or not?

The mighty and powerful f-strings. Well, they are only a sugar syntax on string.format, but whatever. Here I will look at one of the usage scenarios that you should not commit - taking format string from the user. Well, I had to do it in my project, so…

Small advice to fellow engineers

I was working as an outsourced engineer for Big Corporation, or I could say I was in the “shadow workforce”. And as the initial challenge dust disappeared, I was flying on remaining knowledge, but up to a point. There is a moment when you need to cut yourself out of your comfort zone. And I know that it is really difficult for people, especially after crossing the magic “three-year” point.

Python evolution with Luciano Ramalho - summary of podcast

In one of the recent episode of Python podcast, Toby Macey was interviewing Luciano Ramalho. I have a lot of respect for this developer as for me it is one of the last true “Pythonista’s” left in the world. During one hour he talks about his Python beginnings, writing “Fluent Python” book, and his view about new Python features. I recommend listening to the whole podcast, but here is a summary of his opinions about Python evolution.

First look at WSGI and PEP 3333

WSGI - Web Server Gateway Interface. This is Python standard interface between web server software and web applications. The specification was created in 2003 and described in PEP 333, further updated in 2010 in PEP 3333, with backward compatibility to prepare for Python 3 changes.

Playing with Python: Boolean of empty containers

It is funny that when one decides to refresh the basics of Python, watches the first video about types and is already stuck for an hour testing edge cases and wondering why? Let’s explore the bool function with empty containers.