Łukasz Langa @ambv@mastodon.technology

Hey Fearless Leader, @ashfurrow, there appears to be a bug if you try to publish a toot that is literally 512 characters long. Wouldn't be surprised if that was an off-by-one error ;-)

What happens is that if the counter on the Web shows "0" characters left, the "TOOT!" button does nothing. If you trim the toot a little, then it publishes just fine.

There's definitely a balance between releasing too often and sitting on unreleased features and fixes too long.

When developing Black, I'm trying to ensure that every release brings something meaningful to the table in both features and fixes. Apart from two hotfix releases so far, I think I'm on track.

Interestingly, when I already have a bunch of things I really want to release, but the release would be thin otherwise, this forces me to work on the "boring" fixes, etc.

In some decisions, you are not really improving the situation. Rather, you are simply moving disappointment from one place to another. That might still be strategically wise but it's very unsatisfactory.

Today is one of those days when I ended up with such a move.

Sigh 😔

I'm a sucker for meaningless things like this. Black is now the 2nd most popular auto-formatter for Python.

I both totally understand how useless this statistic is, and still feel warm fuzzy feels about it.

This is a strange realization but I really like just sitting in my car. Sure, I like driving, too. But I really mean just sitting. In the parked car.

Just wasted HOURS on this three-part Unix pipeline:

isort -d $FILE | black - | diff -u $FILE -

Error handling for this was surprisingly tricky to get right.

1. If `isort` or `black` are not installed or crash, `diff` will create a patch to delete the file.

2. The fix is to run the pipeline with `set -o pipefail`.

3. However, this is not enough: `diff` uses exit code 1 to indicate files differ and that shadows previous failures.

Swallowing failures of previous commands + non-standard exit codes = PAIN.

The theme by the way is atom-delek-syntax, which is inspired by Vim's delek color scheme.

Atom's Tree Sitter for #python is about to get a lot more colorful 🙂

This is a surprising course of events for me. I found PEP 463 and PEP 505 much more compelling as solutions to common problems, and yet it's PEP 572 that seemingly gained enough traction to get accepted.

Wow! Black, your uncompromising #Python code formatter, passed 100 closed issues today! Let's celebrate with a release:

pip install black==18.4a3

Check it out if you were bothered by its comment handling or how it used to put extra newlines after "return" etc. Now it also formats imports in a way compatible with isort. And it's faster, too!

I enjoy open source a lot, both as a contributor and as a user.

But the single most jarring experience I keep having is with people I can only describe as "aggressively uninformed".

I mean, I'm all for discussing difference in opinion. But when people start out with calling things "shit", "dumb", "what the hell is this", and so on, then we already lost the conversation.

Even if I manage to convince them, it will have to be by proving that their aggressive opinion was wrong. People hate being corrected.

The built-in backup system in macOS works very well, I have recovered from it multiple times. It's virtually zero maintenance so all my family's laptops are happily backed up.

But why it wants to back up 300GB *right after* recovering from the same backup is beyond me.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Until KeyBase supports Mastodon natively, my proof is here:

https://keybase.pub/ambv/mastodonproof.md