This record type proposal looks nice, but I don’t see much benefit over dataclasses (KW_ONLY is ugly, but also uncommon I think). At least it would be a stdlib addition, not a language change.

Arguments against using @property() in Python - other than to replace an attribute.

I agree this is overused a lot. The other place I see it used where it seems reasonable because there’s no obvious alternative is to mark an attribute as read-only.

Summary of None-aware operators being considered for Python. For example, “obj?.attr” which would be None if obj is None, rather than an AttributeError being raised. I hate the idea of this being added - I hope it never does. Partly for some of the reasons in the article and partly because it’s unnecessary complexity.

Interactive page for figuring out how to undo or fix things in git. The “take a backup first” is the best advice. To be honest, I tend to “give up and go to a known good state” a bunch of the time.

I had never heard of git notes before. It seems like they could indeed be really useful if they were exposed more.

This is a really insightful internal look at Sentry’s pricing and scaling in the early days. I think for most of this period we were using Sentry but doing the self-hosted route (paying Sentry $0), but we probably moved to the hosted product towards the end of this time. I remember a period where every billing cycle there was a new pricing plan.

Great walkthrough of Git terms that people find (and are!) comfusing. Most of the time I don’t need to use the majority of these, but it helps to have at least seen explanationions before.

Pretty nasty supply chain attack when using GitHub self-hosted runners.

I’ve definitely had this happen to me a few times 😂: open.substack.com/pub/workc…

Details of a new test vectoriser from Google. If I was still in this business I would definitely be trying this out already!

I’m a bit hesitant given that it seems to me that Gmail’s filtering has significantly deteriorated over the last year or so, and that’s the period they have used this. Their benchmarks show improvements but internal benchmarking is hard.

Interesting anti FaaS post.

Interesting story on digging into a performance issue that goes super deep.

Interesting analysis on typing use by Python core devs - the methodology is a bit weak (which the author admits) but interesting nonetheless.

Interesting story about learning from mistakes. However, if one person can make a $500M mistake, you have a process problem, not a person one.

Just say ‘no’. It’s harder than it sounds, but it is indeed often the best choice.

(I think the Google-killing-products point is misplaced - that’s not saying “no”, it’s saying “yes” and regretting it later).

Interesting long post on the backstory behind Mirai.

Amusing in-office auto-replies (as opposed to OoO).

Interesting intro to Sentry’s work to have multiple regions. I worked on similar projects a couple of times, and it’s much more complex than you might first think.

(If you are small, just host everything in Germany).

Got around to watching the Humane Pin intro and understand why people have panned it so much. Hard to understand how this could get released - it would never have been approved anywhere I’ve worked. (The marketing, not the device).

I feel so seen 😂

Good, long, summary of why you should not be directly invoking setup.py.

An excellent update to Spolsky’s famous Unicode primer.

Good post on opting off the career ladder. Closely reflects the journey I recently went through. I think more people need to do this, but also, it’s really hard/scary.

Truly excellent write up of handling database migratons. The only thing I would add is that you want to ensure that moving off dual-write gets priority in your backlog - too often I’ve seen the urgency drop at that point and code stuck with dual writing for ages. via

This post doesn’t really do what is claims: explaining scaling with minimal engineers but it’s an interesting walkthrough of simple techniques to build a service like (OG) Instagram.