January 2021 – Making Of Things

A Rose By Any Other Name

By Jud | January 30, 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

In all my time thinking about how naming is hard, I’ve never come across a concise set of practical suggestions for choosing variable names in software. Until now. I’ve used the A/HC/LC Pattern my whole career, but never had a term for it. Honestly it could use a better name (naming is hard!) but the concept is solid.

There isn’t a single piece of advice in the above that I disagree with, and a few I absolutely love (my goodness do I hate context duplication in namespaced variables).

The Lies We Tell Ourselves

By Jud | January 19, 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

I’ve written before about the importance of writing documentation. Like anything else it’s a skill that takes both training and practice. The latter only takes time, but there’s not a lot of material out there on the former. Therefore it made me happy to discover Write The Docs, a global community of people who care about documentation.

The recommendations in their Beginner’s Guide To Writing Documentation I found quite helpful. And loved this quote, which is only tangentially related to docs:

Fear is what happens when you’re doing something important. If you are doing work that isn’t scary, it isn’t improving you or the world.

The article argues that writing documentation for yourself and others is one way to alleviate fear, and I agree. So go forth and write!

Put A Bow On It

By Jud | January 4, 2021 | Comments 0 Comment

I spent a bunch of time over the holiday cleaning up some Python tools I’ve written, and packaging them up for easy distribution via an internal PyPI repository.

The endless list of things to learn never ceases to amaze me, in this case I got to play with tox for matrix testing/packaging, and twine for publishing. Also got a lot better at writing setup.py files and integrating quality tools like flake8 and safety.

Here’s a couple helpful write-ups that I found when researching best practices for Python packaging:

Packaging a Python library
Python packaging pitfalls

In the course of the above, I also found it necessary to inquire about modifying an open-source tool for measuring code coverage. Turns out it was easy enough to make the modification and submit a PR to the maintainer. If you’ve never contributed to an open-source project, I highly recommend it!