Tags howto

In this post I describe a way to make a single-language hugo site, dual- (or multi-)language. There are many approaches to this, and which approach is best, depends on kind of multi-language site you want. So before you just implement these steps, please read below what you’re going to get, and then decide if this is (or is not) the best way forward. I mostly wrote this down since it’s my second time doing it, and someone (including future-me) might find these comments helpful.

I created a bunch of commandline programs in Python to help me with machine learning tasks. Last week I got so annoyed that every time I changed or extended a program, I had to also update the commandline interface for it, that I decided to do something about it. And so clargs was born, a package that takes a function, inspects it’s signature, and creates the correct commandline interface through Python’s argparse.

This post is not about this particular package, but about the lessons I learned how to create a package. It’s the latest and greatest and best practices in July 2023. This includes setting up testing (with tox and unittest), setting up GitHub actions (both so that every commit gets tested, and that a new version gets built and pushed to PyPI whenever I tag a new release). It even solves the problem that I want to have one and only one place where I specify the version number!

A recurring event In the Hacker Space Trójmiasto, which I a visit when I’m in town, there are regular events. We were looking for a way to put these events on the (Hugo) website. This is easy enough for simple events that happen occasionally (just hard-code the dates), but we had some extra requirements (two for the end-user, and two technical requirements): An easy way to define recurring meetings (like the monthly picnic, or the bi-weekly board-meeting).

A couple of weeks ago I had to look for a company to rent some Nerf guns from, for a long weekend in the Ardennes with friends. There are several companies in The Netherlands and Belgium doing just that, but I wanted to find one that was on the route. I found myself copy-pasting city and village names into Google Maps to find where all these places were located. Was this unworkable?

Last month I posted a story about creating a stand-alone library from Junegunn Choi’s fzf. This was the first step in an effort to produce a version of fzf that runs in the browser. A second step would be to compile fzf-lib to run in the browser. Doing exactly that will be the content of a next post (after which there will be a couple more, looking at performance, looking at whether it’s the smart thing to do, packaging the whole thing into an npm package).

My home is smart! My home is smart enough to switch off the lights when I’m not there (and then switch them on for a couple of hours each night to avoid break-ins). My home is smart enough to warn me if the front door is left open, or when I should open the window because the level of CO2 is getting too high. However, my home also is very forgetful…

As you may know, I am a great fan of SVG. I don’t think that SVG gets enough credit on the web, as a small file size, infinite resolution, declarative, next gen image format. A reason why SVG is not so popular, may be that may places that allow image upload, don’t allow SVG; such is the case here at Medium as well. There may be good reasons for this (cross browser compatibility, security, SVGs acting different based on how you embed them).

I absolutely love CloudFormation as a tool for creating small and large items on AWS. Having code-based infrastructure, of easily maintaining your system in git, seeing differences, etc is pure joy. There are however (many) times when CloudFormation (or AWS in general) seems to miss some things. In such cases, blogs like this one should help you :). This document is here mostly for historical reference. There is a new and better method, that doesn’t have some of the security implications present in this post.

Every now and then you feel overconfident and decide that a full reinstall of your whole system is in order. It always takes way more time than you anticipated, but in the end you’re left with something better (in the computer), and you understand the world a little bit better yourself. A large challenge every time is to get (neo)vim setup in just the right way to work as a full fledged Python IDE (or, it should be noted that vim was never designed to be an IDE; however we want to at least set it up as a Python development system).