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
MVP of S'mores?
Paul Ganssle
boosted
Today we got our dishwasher fixed under warranty. To diagnose it, the tech stuck a photosensor+magnet onto the front panel over the green status LED and started reading diagnostics. It turns out the status LED is actually a serial port*, and it's continually transmitting status.
I can think of so many gadgets that could and should use this trick...
*It's probably something other than regular serial -- a UART's TX would flicker. I don't know any details.
Paul Ganssle
boosted
The pytest.mark.parametrize feature is amazing, and more people should use it, especially people new to writing #Python tests. But it looks scary. I wrote an explainer: https://nedbatchelder.com/blog/202508/starting_with_pytests_parametrize.html
Paul Ganssle
boosted
Interested in helping out with one of the most innovative, grassroots, publishing efforts around? The Journal of Open Source Software (@joss) is looking for editors: https://blog.joss.theoj.org/2025/08/call-for-editors
We conduct collaborative checklist-based peer review of research software using GitHub issues.
JOSS is a positive, rewarding, community-based reviewing/editing effort. I'm happy to answer questions if anyone is interested.
Paul Ganssle
boosted
Did you know: You can build iOS and Android Python wheels with cibuildwheel, and upload them to PyPI? You can! But not many projects have.
Want to know if your popular package offers iOS or Android support? Here's a leaderboard. Want a great way to contribute? Submit a PR adding iOS and Android support to your favourite package.
@xavdid Yeah I don't really want to scrape the web UI for this information.
Anyone have a reasonable way to programmatically get your Netflix watch history? I have a good way to read my history from Kodi, a decent way to get it from AntennaPod and a just OK way to get the history from VLC, but no way to get it from Netflix, which I would like to include in my tracking. 😔
@aperalesf Pienso en crear una app o página web para encontrar podcasts menos conocidos (un algoritmo anti-algoritmo) pero ya tengo demasiados proyectos 😭
@aperalesf Acabo de escuchar [El podcasting no me enfada, pero me da coraje](https://divagaciones-de-adrian-perales.castos.com/episodes/90-el-podcasting-no-me-enfada-pero-me-da-coraje), y estoy de acuerdo en que es bastante difícil encontrar podcasts independientes.
Por eso, hace poco me bajé la DB de podcast-index.org y la filtré yo mismo, utilizando `popularityScore` para evitar los podcasts demasiado popular. Me funcionó suficientemente bien para encontrar unos podcasts.
Paul Ganssle
boosted
As the Wayback Machine nears 1 trillion archived web pages this October, we're still looking for standout sites to feature.
Reply with your favorite pages to nominate them for the spotlight!
Also I feel that my older one's natural reflex to protect himself against malicious djinn will serve him well in the coming age of superintelligences.
7 year old has written a wish list for Christmas already. It includes "a non laggy PC", "a mouse (not the pet kind)" and "anything I imagine comes true and I can enable and disable it".
My 4 year old has asked to stop aging and in fact he would like to be younger.
Glad to be raising ambitious kids.
@nedbat Do any of the itertools iterators expose stuff like that? My impression was that these things are supposed to be composed into pipelines in a sort of functional programming style, so the details of which one is the outermost container would be irrelevant and maybe bad practice to rely on.
Paul Ganssle
boosted
TIL that, as of Python 3.13, virtual environments write their own .gitignore file. It adds a single line, consisting only of `*`.
Did you know this? Are you still adding `.venv/` to your own .gitignore files?
Paul Ganssle
boosted
boosting from bsky where @buttondown 's @jmduke says:
https://bsky.app/profile/jmduke.com/post/3lv5hwyipu22j
"buttondown is very excited to sponsor @htmlenergy.bsky.social's HTML DAY this coming saturday. if you attend and DM me what you built I will comp you a year's subscription to Buttondown.
at the very least, you owe it to yourself to go to https://html.energy/html-day/2025/index.html and click through to the very zine-core event sites, each of them more lovely than the last. (i am biased, but my favorite is seattle's)"
Paul Ganssle
boosted
I'm very happy to announce @savannah as the Release Manager for Python 3.16 and 3.17!
https://discuss.python.org/t/welcome-the-3-16-and-3-17-release-manager-savannah-bailey/100163
#Python #CPython #Python316 #Python317
@kfogel @kevin Ok I was slightly wrong: https://www.nyc.gov/site/buildings/property-or-business-owner/energy-grades.page
Interesting grading scheme, where "D" is the worst score you can get if you submit any information and F means "no information", with an extra grade, N, which also means "no information" but this time it is OK because they were exempt from providing information.
A few more steps and those quiet and signaling NaNs can evolve like IEEE floats and there will be more "no information" grades than stars in the universe 😛
Paul Ganssle
boosted
The Toad is out of the bag! 🛍🐸
Announcing Toad - a universal UI for agentic coding in the terminal
Programmer working at Google. Python core developer and general FOSS contributor. I also post some parenting content.
Joined Nov 2019
