I recently had issues with long running postgres operations and found these two commands, one for finding long running queries, and one for killing them. My issue turned out to be with an UPDATE instead of a query, but I'm noting this for future use. Note that the interval can …

TL;DR: Instead of && use ; after a command that might have errors.

My main project at work has a nice Make command for getting a new truncated version of our main database. Unfortunately, I can never remember the exact command, and it requires a second command (pg_restore) to update my …

I set up my main project at work to utilize LocalStack this week. I wasn't able to get it working using a virtual environment with Python, but another project at work has it set up through Docker. A coworker that is much more familiar with Docker than I am helped …

For a while now, I've felt unsure about mocking in Python. It has helped me test in the past, but I've also seen a lot of smart people talk or write about its pitfalls.

Recently, I had to test some functionality around calls to Twilio, so I decided to investigate …

Like my previous vs post, this isn't a showdown. Instead, this post is about matching the solution to the problem. The tl;dr is that Celery is great at what it does, but it requires more infrastructure and setup than I needed to solve my problem.

The Problem to Solve …

In writing for this blog, there are some posts I'd like to write that I don't think quite fit the theme of this blog. For example, I want to write short book reviews to link to from my books page, but I don't want them showing up on the index …

I recently* read Timo Zimmermann's post about buying a 'keyboard to last' and it made me realize I haven't posted about my keyboard journey yet. If you don't know much about mechanical keyboards, Brett Cannon's post about deciding on a new keyboard has a lot of great info. It also …

For longer than I care to admit, I was running my end to end tests in only Firefox. I thought it would be trivial to add a fixture to have my tests run using multiple browsers. Unfortunately, there isn't an easy way in pytest to use fixtures as parametrized values …

For the tl;dr instructions, feel free to skip to the last two paragraphs.

Years ago, I used SourceTree for visualizing my git graph. At some point, SourceTree became bloated and I really didn't like the direction it went, so I looked around for alternatives. I forget if I settled …