cat /dev/brain

My personal views on the importance of trust in an open source project

Despite having lots of this documented in python-requests today, I thought a blog post linking to various parts of the documentation and tying it all together with all the necessary caveats would be helpful.

python-requests has been around for a long time. I've been a maintainer for many years and I share some retrospective thoughts on the project

Lessons learned, regrets, and more from over a decade working on an API library

Most people who start using Kotlin are already familiar with Java and its ecosystem. I, on the other hand, am not one of those people and have been looking for easier ways into the Java ecosystem. I found that Kotlin was probably that softer path back. (I wrote Java in …

Recently, I have had the opportunity to work on some APIs that were implementing rate limiting for users. The idea we started with was to implement a limit algorithm that reset after a period of time, e.g., one hour. I researched rate limiting a bit more, and found another …

Recently, I had the (genuine) joy of helping port a Python library with a C extension to work on Python 2 and Python 3. C was my first language that I really understood pretty well and I have some (possibly misplaced) nostalgia for the time when I only ever wrote …

Over the last few months I've been assigned to work on a project called Craton [0]. The project will be an inventory system that can integrate with most of our popular configuration management tools (Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Salt, etc.) and perform automated remediation. My team started Craton and moved it …

Every API client is different. They are shaped by many things, including:

• the author's personal tastes
• the language and its conventions
• the API itself
• the underlying HTTP library

People have told me that they love github3.py and how I designed it. Personally, I feels there is room for significant …

As someone who has written a few API client libraries and works on Requests a bit, I realize I have some overlapping knowledge that I need to share. There are some patterns I've found from building my own API client libraries and helping developers of other client libraries. I hesitate …

In my position at Rackspace, I tend to spend a lot of time using OpenStack's instance of Gerrit to review proposed changes. When reviewing OpenStack changes, I prefer keyboard shortcuts and terminal interfaces so I can explore the affect of a change via my preferred text editor. To accommodate this …

After setting up a home server running Fedora 25, we wanted to use it's large amounts of storage for images and such. Naturally, we reached for Samba to enable network file storage. We installed and configured it, but neither from macOS, nor from Linux could access files after mounting the …

I have started to notice a trend. More and more people are aggressively attempting to integrate themselves into open source projects. Some are doing so spectacularly, while others are struggling. And the people who struggle seem to become agitated, aggressive, and their attempts to contribute discourage everyone involved.

Often, when …

Today, I released Flake8 3.0.0b1. You can try it out by running:

pip install --pre flake8

This marks the start of the culmination of several months worth of work and a couple years of hammock driven development (mostly spent ruminating). You can read about the list of changes …

I have been working on Open Source Software (in one way or another) since 2011 (just over 4 years since my first open source commit on a project). When I started writing open source software it was for fun. I was not a Computer Science/Engineering student. Programming was a …

Tonight marks the release of Betamax 0.5.0. Beyond just reworking the documentation, it also marks the addition of two integrations with popular testing frameworks. Betamax now ships with a pytest fixture that provides an instantiated Session that is being recorded by Betamax. Let's look at how we might …

tl;dr pep8's repository has moved from Johann Rocholl's account to the Python Code-Quality Authority organization.

It's my great pleasure to announce that the pep8 project has moved to the PyCQA organization on GitHub and will hopefully enjoy an expanded team of maintainers as a result. This comes after …

This year I gave the talk "Cutting Off the Internet: Testing Applications that Use Requests" at PyTennessee and PyCon. The recording of the talk is already online with my slides.

At the end of my talk, I promised to write a blog post going into far more detail and covering …

You may have already heard about this, but Guido van Rossum has co-authored PEP 484 [1] to standardize a basic set of Type Hints. If you've heard of PEP 484 already, this probably isn't the one-line summary you've heard about. In fact, if you've heard about this already, you've probably …

This year was my second year attending PyCon North America (a.k.a., PyCon US) and once again I loved every second of it.

tl;dr I didn't see a lot of talks in person but I spoke to a large number of people this year and made some great …

It is my distinct pleasure to announce the 0.4.0 release of the requests toolbelt. This version comes almost a year after the release of 0.3.1.

A lot of work was put into the toolbelt in those 10 months though. We reorganized the documentation to make it …

On August 2nd, 2013 I opened issue 122 on github3.py's issue tracker. The driving force behind the "Roadmap for 1.0" was to clean up an API that I fundamentally disliked. Yesterday, on December 7th, 2014, I released the first alpha version of 1.0. The following is …

This is the second in what I hope will be a series of explorations of advanced features in requests.

Websites and servers sometimes, misbehave. They can misbehave in a number of ways:

• read errors
• large numbers of redirects
• failure to connect
• 500 errors

What most people don't know is that …

This is the first in what I hope will be a series of explorations of advanced and lesser known features in requests.

Recently, the requests team released version 2.4.3. In this version, we had a very significant new feature released that was contributed by Carol Willing. It has …

tl;dr Flake8 development has moved to GitLab and has a mirror on GitHub. Please send all further bug reports and pull requests to the GitLab repository.