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Serialising Rust tests - 14 Jan 2019 Rust  serial_test  Tools 

I’m once again prodding the potboiler tests and a couple of the tests I was doing wanted to mess around with the shared database. This had the problem that multiple tests would collide with each other, as the default for Rust testing is to run everything in parallel. This is unusual, but good in many…

Experiments in converting code from C to Rust - 27 Nov 2018 C  Rust  Tools 

I’m quite fond of Rust (as a few blog posts on the topic may indicate), but one item I hadn’t really explored was replacing/rewriting existing C code bases in Rust. There’s a general joke about the general notion of “rewriting everything in Rust is of course always the right thing to do!” (Google “rust evangelism…

Not all watchers are created equal (or how to make yak shaving useful) - 14 Aug 2018 Clojure  Tools 

I’ve been hacking around with a Clojurescript project recently, and it resulted in a certain amount of yak shaving when I found the watcher system I was using was eating a lot of CPU. On the one hand, yak shaving is bad, because you’re doing other things that aren’t the core task you’d originally meant…

PSA: Many ways to manage your Python dependencies - 3 Jul 2018 Howto  Python  Tools 

Having recently learnt about a few more tools, I felt it was worth writing this post. It’s pretty much a PSA, and some of you may well have found most of these, but there are a lot of Python developers out there who haven’t, and the improvements when using some them are considerable, so it’s…

Bazel: Fast, Correct, Usable – choose two - 14 Mar 2018 Rant  Tools 

I’d recently gotten reminded about Bazel, Google’s ‘boil the ocean‘ build system, and decided to give it a proper go. TL;DR – it’s not ready yet, and might not ever be, unless you’re willing to throw away everything else. I’m generally on the lookout for good build systems. Some of my colleagues are perfectly happy…

Sked: merged calendars as a service - 22 Jan 2018 Python  Tools  Web 

I have a little bit of an obsession with calendars, mostly generated ones via a variety of tools. I don’t do well with pen-and-paper for this sort of things, and one of these days I will write the Grand Unified Todo Manager To Rule Them All (which will also eat emails, Calendars and probably a…

Panegyric: showing off what we’ve done on Github - 4 Jan 2018 LShift  Tools  Web 

Last month, I said we’d be talking more about open source work that we’re doing. This month, I’ve been building Panegyric, a WordPress plugin (which is what this site is written in). This plugin (which isn’t live on the site yet, but will be soon) lists all the Github pull requests we’ve recently done. However…

Extending Splitwise’s currency conversion - 25 Apr 2017 Python  Tools  Web 

I’m rather fond of Splitwise, which is an app/website for recording money owed between multiple people. Myself and my partner use it a lot for various expenses, and it’s really useful when you’ve got many different payments, and you need to keep track over time. We’ve got one repeated payment however that’s been in US…

Cross-grading for fun and profit - 13 Dec 2016 Debian  Tools 

First thing you’re probably wondering: What’s cross-grading? Well, it’s a bit like upgrading, except more sidewise than definitely upwards. It involves the changing of the architecture of a system, most typically from 32-bit to 64-bit, and most typically from x86 to x86-64 (although similar options are apparently doable for other architecture families, including ARM, MIPS and…

Potboiler - 31 Oct 2016 Potboiler  Python  Rust  Tools 

Over the last couple of years I’ve been reading and talking about a lot of things related to distributed systems. This is a common train of thought around here, and after working on this on and off for the past 18 months or so (the version you’re seeing here is in fact version 3 having repeatedly changed…

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