Automatic For The People

When I quit my first job after nearly 12 years, it was a shock to lose access to all the software I’d spent years developing. While I believe strongly in Egoless Programming, and resisting the notion of “my code”, so much reference material I’d built up was suddenly lost to me. I decided in that moment I needed to build up a portfolio that could not be taken away.

A few weeks ago I published Chrome Local Storage, a Python package that can read from and write to the Chrome’s browser’s internal storage, either one running locally or on an Android mobile device. The first draft didn’t have any CI/CD automation in place, but this weekend I fixed that.

It now automatically sets the version according to the git tag, runs some limited automated tests, runs a linter, scans both the code and dependencies for security vulnerabilities, and publishes builds to PyPI. All via Github Actions.

Did this project really need a complete pipeline? Not really, I doubt I’ll see much reason to modify it in the future. But I wanted to learn Github Actions, and I’d wanted to learn Poetry. Now I’ve done both, and have a publicly available reference to which I’ll always have access for when I need to build Python packages in the future. And if others need the same, they can use it as well.