Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org
Programmer working at Google. Python core developer and general FOSS contributor. I also post some parenting content.
Joined Nov 2019
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I haven’t had a chance to set up a calendly link or anything, but if anyone is interested in meeting up with me during #PyConUs, shoot me an email and we can arrange a time. 🙂
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Latest post is a big one: “Why you shouldn’t invoke setup.py directly”
A lot of people don’t know about this because we haven’t been great about getting the word out. This blog post is in part an attempt to remedy this.
Please help spread the word!
https://blog.ganssle.io/articles/2021/10/setup-py-deprecated.html
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From the archives of my blog but still very relevant: "pytz: The Fastest Footgun in the West", about why you probably shouldn't be using pytz:
https://blog.ganssle.io/articles/2018/03/pytz-fastest-footgun.html
Paul Ganssle
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This post basically describes my approach to understanding computers (and to doing physics):
https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2023/05/30/eng/
- watch / poke / use system
- develop mental model of why it is
- find where that model breaks and you can not predict what the system does correctly
The places where your mental model and reality are wrong are the most interesting and productive things to look at!
Do you use #linux and #keepassxc?
I am wondering if you also see this behavior: https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/9438#issuecomment-1564883094
If you don’t, what OS and desktop environment are you using?
Paul Ganssle
boosted
Next, GitHub will be removing support for Python 2.7 from actions/setup-python in under a month, on 19th June. 🪦
"Breaking changes
"Hello everyone. The Python 2.7.x will be removed from python-versions and it won't be possible to set up Python 2.7.x by setup-python.
"The motivation for the changes
"Python2.7 is not supported since January 1, 2020."
This is the one place where ChatGPT has seemed useful to me, by the way. When I try and use it for anything Python-related, it’s worse than useless because I know Python stuff way better than ChatGPT, and it’s faster for me to just do it myself anyway.
When I’m trying to get a handle on super basic questions, ChatGPT seems to be kind of OK at explaining things in such a way as to unblock me.
Not that I think that there’s something we or they could be doing a ton better. I’m sure there are reasons for why it’s all confusing and disorienting.
Spending time trying to contribute to open source Android applications really brings me a lot of empathy for new Python users.
I barely understand what I’m doing. The packaging ecosystem seems complicated and I don’t understand it. When I try and upgrade versions a bunch of stuff breaks. The documentation refers to a bunch of stuff I don’t understand, and seems relevant only to newer code bases.
Paul Ganssle
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The votes have been counted, announcing the 2022 #Wikimedia #Commons Picture of the Year 
Great cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo), Little egret (Egretta garzetta) and Gadwell duck (Mareca strepera) in Taudaha Lake, near Katmandu, Nepal.
Attribution: Prasan Shrestha / CC-BY-SA 4.0
3,600+ voters selected this picture first out of 1,102 featured pictures and 55 other finalists!
See the rest of the results: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Commons:Picture_of_the_Year/2022/Results
Paul Ganssle
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Long shot, but anyone with Android / Android Auto experience know what’s going on here?
Long shot, but anyone with Android / Android Auto experience know what’s going on here?
Paul Ganssle
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I'm over the moon that the #Python helper function I write more than _any_ other, `chunks`, is coming to the stdlib in 3.12 as `itertools.batched(iterable, n)`! It takes a long iterable and yields chucks (or batches) of length `n`.
I think I've pasted the same Stackoverflow snippet into... 10 projects at this point? So this is huge for me.
https://docs.python.org/3.12/library/itertools.html#itertools.batched
Carter’s has this shirt for kids, but I can’t find an adult version anywhere. Trying to tell Amazon or a search engine that it’s important that the shirt have all three colors (much less in a specific order) seems impossible.
One day I hope ML technology advances to the point that I can describe a shirt and find out if someone is selling something like it.
Paul Ganssle
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@mjgardner @icing actually, being liberal in accepting things is not a good idea either. If it violates the protocol, eject, close, kill, abort. At once. That leads to better code and protocols in the longer run.
Paul Ganssle
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Do I know anyone who's worked on budgeting infrastructure projects (physical infrastructure like roads and buildings, not software) who would be open to chatting with me for a short time and answering some questions about terminology used in that context?
Paul Ganssle
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Today's my last day at Google 🥲
I'm taking some time off to focus on my family, personal health, and to work on my bots.
If anyone knows of a role that'll fit me, I'll appreciate the intro! 😊
It’s relatively easy to make a drop-in replacement for these, but also we’re deprecating them because they’re conceptually the wrong thing to do, so it’s best to migrate to using aware datetimes if possible: https://blog.ganssle.io/articles/2019/11/utcnow.html
datetime.utcnow and datetime.utcfromtimestamp will be deprecated in #python 3.12: https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/103857
If you maintain a package, now is probably a good time to grep your source code for utcnow and utcfromtimestamp to get out ahead of the deprecation warnings. 📅🕐
Paul Ganssle
boosted
$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mapper/to_be_wiped status=progress59001459200 bytes (59 GB, 55 GiB) copied, 904 s, 65.3 MB/s
65 MB/s, nice, nice. At this rate it’s only going to take…. 3 days to wipe this 16TB drive.
Programmer working at Google. Python core developer and general FOSS contributor. I also post some parenting content.
Joined Nov 2019
