The experience of developing and sharing free/open source software for 8-bit machines in the mid-1980s.

Kick-start your next Python project with the right template and establish good coding practices from day 1.

Tame the chaos of build, SCM, test and other internal development infrastructure with Kubernetes.

Testing and debugging an Obsidian plugin on multiple platforms.

This pip gotchya can cause difficult-to-troubleshoot errors.

Configuring a Linux-based Gitlab runner to support Docker-based builds is relatively straight-forward and well-documented. Doing the same with Windows is a bit less so. Here’s how to configure a Windows Server 2019 VM to host Docker-based builds with Visual Studio or other Windows-based tools.

Themeable Stream Deck icon pack for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. Download from Github

Themeable Star Wars Squadrons icon pack for Stream Deck. Download from Github

A themeable language-neutral icon pack for Stream Deck with the stream-deck-elite plugin for Elite Dangerous. Download from Github

On Windows, Jekyll will not run out of the box with Ruby 2.7.x. A few additional steps are required. Unfortunately many of the guides out there are out of date and/or refer to tools that are no longer supported so here are the steps that worked for me as of the time of this post.

Automate tasks with Microsoft online apps from the command-line with Python.

How get the 7” HDMI touch display working with brobwind’s RPI 3 Android Pie build.

DevMock is a network test tool that allows you to create “mock” servers with HTTP/HTTPS, SSH or telnet/socket interfaces that will provide responses to requests or commands that you define.

A simple end-to-end example of using JSON Web Tokens (JWT) for authentication with token refresh in a Python Flask web server with an Angular front-end.

A simple example of embedding the latest version of the Apache MINA pure Java SSHD server in an application.

I’m moving all of my old site content over to Github Pages.

If you are enrolled in the Windows Insider program and have been hit with this message when trying to update to 1903 and none of the various other Googled solutions work, try this one from Windows support forum user “LenniL”:

The Click Python library supports creating command-line applications written in Python with robust argument and option parsing and many other useful features tha go above and beyond what is offered by other packages that attempt to fill the same need. This is a very simple example of a Python command-line utility using Click with a setuptools-based installer.

Integrating D3.js with Angular to create reusable chart components. This is an updated version of the original post that covered integrating D3.js (version 4) with Angular 2. This version covers the latest Angular version (currently 4.2.4).

Get your C64 online with the help of the Raspberry Pi, OpenCBM and the ZoomFloppy.

Getting your C64 online and the OpenCBM working with Raspberry Pi is fairly straightforward, but there is a lot outdated info out there that might make it a bit confusing. This guide rolls up the basics in one place.

Android Things (formerly “Brillo”) is a streamlined version of Android designed for small form-factor and IoT devices. Here is a simple example of a Things app that provides a RESTful web interface to control the state of an LED on a Raspberry Pi GPIO port.

A quick example of creating a lazy-loaded module with angular-cli.

Lazy-loading can dramatically improve the performance of your Angular 2 application by loading content only when the user requests it. This is a simple example of lazy-loading using angular-cli.

Integrate D3.js (version 4) with the Angular 2 component life cycle to create reusable charts and other visualizations that support animation and dynamic data.

Auth0‘s standard Angular 2 quick-start uses SystemJS and loads the Auth0 Javascript files globally from index.html. That’s fine for demo purposes, but not ideal for production. I’ve created a github repo (and some additional notes in this gist) that demonstrates using Auth0 with an Angular 2 app generated with angular-cli. This example loads Auth0 as modules and lets Webpack bundle it with the rest of your Javascript.

Javascript development certainly has its ups and downs, but one of the good things about its ecosystem is the ability to easily share projects and quickly get other developers up and running. With most projects, it is simply a matter of cloning the repo and running “npm install” and you are ready to go without needing anything else pre-installed on your system besides NodeJS/NPM. With python, it’s usually not quite that simple.

This is an old project that provides OpenGL scene and object management functionality. The goal was to provide a native core graphics library that would run on Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and iOS. It is written in C and provides compatibility wrappers around the OpenGL APIs to account for platform differences.

The Python LDAP packages (python-ldap and pyldap) mostly work on macOS, but if you try to use some options and APIs, you will run into trouble.

JSON Web Tokens are a standard method of securing exchanges between two parties (such as web server app and client) that has a number of advantages over other methods of securing exchanges such as cookie-based sessions – enhanced security, less overhead and statelessness to name a few.

With the rise of the single-page application (SPA) web front-ends and mobile apps, the backend of many web applications is a collection of RESTful interfaces that provide JSON data rather than generating HTML. The rendering is up to the client side. While there are some drawbacks to this approach (heavier client, slower initial page loads, etc.), there are also a number of advantages, not the least of which is better separation of concerns since the front-end and back-end code are completely independent of one another.

Cmder includes better command-line tab completion – normally, paths will be completed using the default Windows path separator, the backslash (“\”). But Windows has recognized the forward slash (“/”) as an optional path separator for a while now and there are instances where this might be desirable, especially if you switch between Windows and Unix-like environments (macOS, Linux) often as I do.

For debugging pytest executions, the official VSCode Python extension documentation recommends creating an additional file in your project and setting up a launcher to start the debugger against it. While this is simple, I really don’t like having to modify my project’s code or add source files just to satisfy my editor/IDE.

Update July 30, 2017: a new simplified method that works for both Linux/MacOS and Windows with no changes to your Flask project required.

Visual Studio Code with the the Python extension makes for a great Python development environment – especially if you work on blended Python/Javascript web apps. Here’s how to debug a Flask 0.11.x (or later) app without having to add files or modify your project code. See “Solution 2” here for debugging an older version of Flask.

It had been a while since I last started a Flask-based project, so I decided to have a look at what’s. new in the current release. Earlier this year, Flask and several other Python web development projects were organized under the Pallets Projects open source community and governance model. Along with the move, Flask 0.11 was released with several improvements and new features.