My website has search functionality. You can visit the search page (or the homepage or the magnifying glass in the top right), enter a search query, and if I've written something about it (which is quite likely), the matching pages will come up for your reading pleasure. Under the hood,…
In case you didn't know, I have a blog - you're reading it now. It's not like what most people think of when they think "blog". It's guides, tales and random thoughts about the things I do, play around with or find interesting. The same can be said for the…
If you need to make HTTP requests in Python, you're probably using the fantastically simple and ergonomic requests library (or httpx in the async world). However, it's another dependency to manage and keep up-to-date. If you want to make HTTP requests without an additional dependency, or another library author has…
If you're reading this post through an RSS aggregator, or were directed here from one, you may have already seen the issue I'm about to describe, and already swore my name. If you didn't, I'd recommend subscribing, for completely unbiased reasons. This is a tale of RSS, and an easily…
Computers exist for doing work, usually useful, often not. In rare instances, it's useful to make a program do nothing at all. My primary use case for this is Docker containers, where it's useful to have the container do nothing, so it can be exec-d into as part of another…
GitHub, my public code hosting platform of choice (I have my own Gitea server, too), has GitHub Pages, a free static file hosting platform. I use GitHub Pages for a few personal projects, where I either don't need or want to host the code myself, or I want to explicitly…
If you look at any software project, its codebase is rarely just the application itself. There's always a few other things in there: Tests (hopefully), linters, complicated setup scripts, incredibly complicated compile scripts. All of which take a lump of code and turn it into a full project. To make…
Using an ORM adds a handy layer between you and the database tables. Sure, you can write SQL, but most developers find it easier to think of a list of complex objects than they do a collection of rows. However, it's important to remember what's going on under the hood…
BeautifulSoup is a very popular HTML parsing library for Python. It's about as popular for HTML parsing as requests is for HTTP requests. BeautifulSoup allows you to provide some HTML markup as a string, and then interrogate and mutate it however you need. Whether to find specific tags, add new…
Today is a special day for me, professionally anyway. It's a day I get to tick a fun item off my bucket list, that I didn't think I'd get the chance to. Today, a CVE was released where I am the discoverer: CVE-2023-28837. I have my first CVE!What is a…
Hello internet, it's been a while. I've been working on something for a while, and today's the day I get to finally release it! Yes, I redid my website - again! But, depending on how often you talk to me, I redid my website finally. This update has been a…
Internet Explorer was, in its prime, the most popular internet browser in the world. Originally released alongside Windows 95, its headline feature seemed to be that it was maintained by Microsoft and was automatically installed. It wasn’t until Internet Explorer 2.0 in November 1995 that feature we’re used to, like…
It was a normal (for 2021) Sunday evening back in July, I was minding my own business, obviously doing something super cool, when I spotted a message from a certain badger-y fellow in the Self Hosted show’s Discord. Alex has the lovely and weird ability of reliably nerd-sniping me into…
It’s no secret that GitLab is a beast of an application. As self-hosted git servers go, it’s easily the most powerful and feature complete. But that weight comes at a cost: resource usage. GitLab is no slouch, easily consuming upwards of 6GB of RAM by default without doing anything, and…
For anyone who’s spoken to me, they’ll know I’m very quick to link people to posts I’ve written. That’s not in terms of pushing the things I’ve written (usually), but also being able to retrieve the links as quick as possible. I recently added search search to my website, and…
My website is built with Hugo, a great static site generator with a bunch of features. One of the big missing features though is search. Hugo has documentation on a bunch of different integrations, but none of them quite did what I wanted. Over the last few months, I’ve been…
As a developer I do basically everything in git and for fun I run my own git server on my home server. I’ve swapped around quite a lot between GitLab and Gitea, but finally settled on GitLab. It’s a bit heavy, but the deep CI integration is really nice. <update>…
My website is a very important project to me. I’ve written a lot of content over the years, useful both to me and other internet folks. Currently, my website is a static site, powered by Hugo. Because it’s static, the content is served insanely quickly and handles any insane load…
It’s that time again, time for another Django LTS release. Since Django 2.2, back in 2019, a lot has changed in tech, in Python and of course in Django. Historically, I’ve worked entirely on LTS versions, hence combining these 3 releases together. Staying on the LTS version is a trade-off…
This year’s Hacktoberfest was a little different, mostly in quite how much the internet gave a fuss about it. Given quite how much of the internet was talking about it back in early October, it doesn’t take long to find information and context on why it was so controversial. Here’s…
I recently had a far from fun morning. I had my website cloned on my desktop, with some commits which weren’t upstreamed. Having done some work on my laptop, upstream was ahead of my desktop, which needed rectifying. git pull -r is a great feature of git, which does a…
Django already does some pretty incredible things when it comes to performance, especially in the ORM layer. The lazy loading, fluent interface for querying means it’ll only fetch the data you need, when you need it. But it can’t handle everything for you, and often needs some help to work…
Storing passwords is a pretty simple problem in software development, right? Wrong! Storing passwords correctly is pretty complicated. With that said, it’s very simple to just lean on work someone else has done, and the libraries available for your language of choice. In reality, you should never do it yourself.…
Yesterday, an email was sent to django-announce, informing of an upcoming security update, labelled “high” severity. Previous notifications like this have been one week before the actual disclosure; This email, just 12 hours. The updates were scheduled to be released 12:00 UTC the next day (today). Already, not the best…
This is year number three of my participation in Hacktoberfest, the initiative from DigitalOcean, and new this year, Dev.to. In previous years, the objective was to submit five pull requests to an open-source project. This year, the number was reduced to four, for some reason. In 2018, I submitted a…
Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) teaches that classes can have two kinds of attributes: Instance and Static. Instance variables are attached to a specific instance of the class, and each has separate memory locations. Static variables are tied to the class itself, and are shared between instances. The difference between the two…
April marks the release of Django 2.2, the latest LTS version of the popular Python web framework. Django 2.2 marks almost two years of development since the last LTS release, 1.11 in April 2017, and brings with it some very large improvements and changes which naturally come with a major…
Hacktoberfest is a great initiative created by DigitalOcean and GitHub to get more developers contributing to open-source projects. After opening a set number of pull requests to open-source projects, they’re rewarded with branded swag. As someone who does a lot of development in their free time, it’s not hard for…
I’ve had a website for around four years now, starting with a python CGI-based site hosted at 1&1, and evolving into its current form, powered by Hugo. Although I’m a web developer, I’m very far from a designer. I really can’t design anything!Alternatives In the past, I’ve used services like…