A.k.a: Mastodon, Twitter, “engagement”, and designing against addiction The other day, former Twitter designer Jon Bell wrote this thread on the Fediverse, in which he lays out lessons learned from his time at Twitter, lessons that he thinks and hopes Mastodon and Fediverse generally will learn from. I think it’s worth engaging with seriously, but I also …
A friend asked me about this recently, so I thought I’d write up what I do. First, use Pytest. It is good. It is your friend. It makes running tests a dee-lite. The builtin Django test runner is fine, but I much prefer writing and configuring Pytest. Next: where do I put my tests? I’ve …
OK, OK, we all know this, right? This is why we have database migrations, because our models (for me, this roughly means “database-persisted instances of some kind of in-memory object”, but you can interpret it more widely if that’s useful for you) change through time. We didn’t know we needed to track whether a Frobble …
Or, what to do about HTTP 202 Sometimes, we write code that takes a while to run. Whether that’s because of a big linear optimization problem (it could take minutes!) or because of external HTTP calls (it could take seconds!), it would increase the latency of our HTTP responses unacceptably, and so we have to …
I’ve been struggling to write this next piece because I feel like I don’t actually know how to do this. But I’ll write what I do know, and I hope that it helps you! There are two kinds of themes I’ve written for Sphinx: themes for HTML output and themes for PDF output. I understand …
I’m thinking about *hospitality*, and social media. Every social media site I’ve used (and services more broadly, really) encodes certain notions of hospitality. When you post something, you are inviting certain people into your space, based on the site you’re using and who can see it and the ways they can interact with it or …
Let’s say you want to build your docs in different formats. I already alluded to html versus dirhtml, but the distinction between those is relatively small; it’s just a matter of directory structure. What if I want to build my docs as PDFs or ePubs or something else? Well, Sphinx can do it. By default, …
Continue reading “Building docs for different targets with Sphinx (with bonus Unicode support)”
In foo.py: In test_foo.py (running under pytest, with pytest-mock): It took me a tick to realize that the function definition was being evaluated at import time, including the values for the kwargs. Even though the body, of course, wasn’t being evaluated. I solved it with this change to foo.py: This is related to the thing …
You’ve seen it before: software projects with lucid and lovely documentation, all available on subdomain.readthedocs.org. So, how do? Well, the good folks at Read the Docs have made your life very easy. Assuming your documentation’s reStructuredText source is kept in git, and you are OK with pushing it to GitHub, you can get Read the …
I’ve fielded a few questions lately from folks about Sphinx, reStructuredText, and documentation in the Python world and more broadly. So I thought I’d write up a bit of an intro to how I use and understand these tools, and how better documentation makes me a better developer. Restructured understanding of reStructuredText There’s a lot …