Latest blog posts
Where I write about things like Python, Django, JavaScript and Linux.
I've just given a talk at PyCon UK, called Syntactic Sugar vs Maintainability, looking at balancing helping your users at the cost of your sanity.
The synopsis was:
Is it ever worth committing coding sins for the greater good? We'll look at techniques which can make your code easier to use at the cost of being harder to maintain, and when the effort is worth the reward.
There are plenty of ways in which you can use and abuse the power of python to make your library code easier for your users to work with. I'm going ...
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Tagulous v0.13.0 is now available - it adds support for Django 1.11 and addresses several issues - see the changelog for full details.
Note that to support for Django 1.11, the names of automatically generated tag models has had to change - they're no longer allowed to start with an underscore. There is a simple fix, but this version does therefore require additional upgrade steps - see the upgrade notes for more information.
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Tagulous v0.12 is now available - it adds support for Django 1.10 and addresses several issues - see the changelog for full details.
Note that this version may require additional upgrade steps - see the upgrade notes for more information.
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I've released a new version of Mara, my network service framework written in Python. It aims to make it easy to build TCP/IP services, such as echo servers, flash policy servers, chatrooms, talkers and MUDs.
It's event-based; that is to say you write event listener functions which you bind to events that your service raises - like Connect, Receive or Disconnect.
Mara is on pypi, so you can pip install mara, then start writing your service. An echo server in Mara looks like this:
from mara import Service
service = Service()
@service.listen(mara.events.Receive)
def receive(event ...
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Tagulous is a tagging library for Django which is based on ManyToManyField and ForeignKey relationships. I've been developing and using it internally for several years, and have recently tidied it up for release; it supports Django 1.4 to 1.9a, on Python 2.7 to 3.5.
It started with a simple enough idea - rather than use generic relations like other tagging libraries, use a subclass of ManyToManyField which supports assignment using tag strings, to allow things like this:
class Person(models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=255)
skills = TagField()
person = Person.objects.create(name='Bob', skills='run ...
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