Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

A pseudo-TDD workflow using expected failures, wherein I describe how you can use xfail and VCS history rewriting to make a TDD history even if you didn't do TDD (this probably makes more sense once you've read the article):

https://blog.ganssle.io/articles/2021/11/pseudo-tdd-xfail.html

It is wild to me that

1. nearly every commercial species of eel is endangered,
2. no one has ever successfully bred an eel in captivity\* and
3. eel is available in basically every sushi place in America (it's actually hard to avoid!

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eel#Commercial_species

\*Some scientists managed to get some new eels hatched, but they died after 18 days. Not exactly a good foundation for aquaculture.

I thought my first son was the master of stealing glasses because he had a way of looking away from you to draw your attention elsewhere while he grabbed your glasses.

Last night my second son took it to a new level when he managed to steal one of my contact lenses right out of my eye.

"Papa, I fixed it. I plugged it out and plugged it in and then it worked!"

Only 3 years old and already turning it off and then on again. So proud.

New blog post out today: How and why I use pytest's xfail: https://blog.ganssle.io/articles/2021/11/pytest-xfail.html

@skunksarebetter Am I mis-remembering, or did you once recommend a CLI tool that would execute a terminal command in response to changes in a set of files? I remember it as being a recommendation for `fzf`, but I'm not seeing that anywhere, and `fzf` doesn't seem to advertise that capability.

I should probably be less negative and more grateful that my employer has allowed me to work on this on work time. Thanks, Google!

Coming soon to Python: A basically full-spec iso8601 parser.

Though I'm already pessimistically expecting a bunch of comments like, "Finally, I still didn't understand why they didn't do that in the first place." and "Oh this function is finally useful, thought the core devs were being intransigent on this."

Comments available on HN (on the front page now!), subreddits r/Python and r/programming and lobste.rs:

https://lobste.rs/s/ajhbif/why_you_shouldn_t_invoke_setup_py_directly

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

Is there a costume that clearly reads as "robot maker" (to match my sons' robot costumes)?

The best I've come up with is "mad scientist", which doesn't seem right to me.

Of course, just when I am feeling maximally motivated to sit and write a blog post or something else creative, the SSD on my home server inexplicably won't boot.

Asked about this on twitter and someone helped me debug it, it turns out the issue was that the `.target` was outliving the services it's grouping, so the `.timer` thought there was nothing to do:

https://serverfault.com/a/1080223/336913

Seems someone submitted my article on Hamming numbers to reddit and it got a lot of upvotes but zero comments: https://teddit.net/r/Python/comments/q3xryc/paul_ganssle_generating_ksmooth_numbers_in_python/

Probably for the best, but it kinda feels like when you give a talk and get zero questions at the end...

Any #systemd experts want to take a crack at this one? https://serverfault.com/q/1079993/336913

Trying to set up a single timer that rebuilds all my websites at some regular interval, but I can only ever get it to trigger once using the only method I've found to do it.

My "short" blog post on generating regular numbers in Python, finally available only 7 months after I started writing it 😅: https://blog.ganssle.io/articles/2021/10/regular-numbers-in-python.html

#python