Damian’s notes

Django podcast about speeding up your Django tests, featuring Adam Johnson, who literally wrote the book on the subject.

Having useful tests, and having them run quickly and often, is a cornerstone to reliable web development—something I am appreciating in Django all the more now I am working on not-Django for my day job.

While we were all busy reimplementing jQuery and replacing it with more elaborate JavaScript frameworks, plain JavaScript has quietly gained features that mean you can do a lot on a small site without requiring complex frameworks at all.

Instructions for renaming the ‘master‘ branch in your Git repository to ‘main‘. There is no particular reason for the main branch of your repo to be called ‘master‘, so you might as well rename it rather spend eternity explaining to people that this isn’t a reference to ‘master–slave’ relationships; ‘main’ is as good a replacement as any.

A runtime for TypeScript or JavaScript programs that is positioned as a single-executable alternative to TypeScript + Babel + Node + NPM + ESLint + Prettier + Webpack. Modules are imported from URLs (same system as ES6 modules running in browsers), and asynchronous APIs use promises rather than those old-fashioned callbacks (so not a drop-in replacement for Node). Implemented in Rust, and aiming to be secure-by-default by restricting access to files and networks unless explicitly allowed.

Apple’s photos app does machine-learning-powered analysis of all your photos and stores the result sin SQLite files that can reveal a wealth of information if you know how.

HTTPretty is a Python package for writing tests for code that interacts with remote web services. You write expectations for requests the test code should make and the responses, and the tests run without accessing real networks at all. Works particularly nicely with JSON-based protocols.

I am beginning to think that configurable web sites are a terrible idea. Here is an old article ranting about the hugely complicated web frameworks created so that sites may be built ‘without writing a single line of code’.

pipx is a tool to help you install and run end-user applications written in Python. Each app is installed in its own virtualenv and the commands added to a directory you put on your path.

Using GitHub Actions to updatge the README of a repository of short tips & tricks articles.