Ned Batchelder    My son Nat is autistic, which makes him quiet and passive. He depends on routines and can be anxious when they vary. We try to prepare him for changes and explain what will happen. He usually watches the world around him seriously.Because of all that, when he does show us a genuine smile, it is...

Ned Batchelder    I posted a Python tidbit about checking if a string consists entirely of zeros and ones:I got a bunch of replies suggesting other ways. I wanted to post those, but I also wanted to check if they were right. A classic testing structure would have required putting them all in functions, etc, which I...

Ned Batchelder    My son Nat has autism, and one way it affects him is he can be very quiet and passive, even when he wants something very much. This played out on our drive home from Thanks giving this week.Nat loves his routines, and wants to know what is going to happen. We make him a two week calendar every...

Ned Batchelder    I am a liberal. I believe in helping people. But these days I see cruelty masquerading as righteousness and selfishness labelled as freedom. I see politicians lifting up the powerful and stepping on the already downtrodden.Hubert Humphrey laid out a rubric I think we are doing poorly at:The...

Ned Batchelder    I posted a Python tidbit about how for loops can assign to other things than simple variables, and many people were surprised or even concerned:params query : QUERY, page size : , Get page, page, page, ... for params page in itertools.count : data requests.get...

Ned Batchelder    I was on episode of the On The Board podcast: Taking on New Challenges. I’m never quite sure what parts of my experience people will be able to relate to, but it was a good chat with Jason and Michael about becoming a newb late in my career.

Ned Batchelder    Something many people don’t realize is that I didn’t write the original coverage.py. It was written by Gareth Rees in . I’ve been extending and maintaining it since . This ancient history came up this week, so I grabbed the version from archive.org to keep it here for posterity.I...

Ned Batchelder    Zizmor is a new tool to check your GitHub action workflows for security concerns. I found it really helpful to lock down actions.Action workflows can be esoteric, and continuous integration is not everyone’s top concern, so it’s easy for them to have subtle flaws. A tool like zizmor is great for...

Ned Batchelder    I use a lot of git aliases because I work in the terminal and aliases give me short commands for common operations. They are defined in my global git config file and range from simple to powerful but twisty.First, some basic aliases for operations I do often: alias br branch co ...

Ned Batchelder    I have two main approaches for producing changelogs, but both are based on the same principles: make it convenient for the author to create them, then make it possible to use the information automatically to benefit the readers.The first way is with a tool such as scriv, which I wrote, but which...