Today I Learned

Short TIL posts

1834 posts latest post 2026-04-18
Publishing rhythm
Apr 2026 | 20 posts
I spoke at Python Web Conf 2022

I spoke at python webconf in March 2022 about how I deploy this blog on a continuous basis.

Building this blog has brought me a lot of benefits. I have a set of custom curated notes to help describe a problem and how to solve it to me. At theis point it’s not uncommon to google an Issue I am having and finding my own blog with exactly the solution I need at the top.

I also bump into people from time to time that recognize me from the blog, its a nice conversation starter, and street cred.

The talk recently released on Youtube, you can watch it without having a ticket to the conference for free. There were a bunch of other talks that you should check out too!

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I turned on 2FA for all of my pypi packages

I got all the pypi packages that I own behind 2 factor authentication. 💪

Recently this really made it’s rounds in the python news since pypi was requiring critical package maintainers to have 2FA on and even offering them hardware tokens to help them turn this on.

I feel like this caused a bit of confusion as turning on 2FA does not mean that you need to do anything different to deploy a package, and it DOES NOT require a hardware token. You can continue using your favorite 2FA app.

You might wonder what this means for my projects. It means that to edit any sensitive content such as pull a new api token, add/remove maintainers, or deleting a release I need to use a TOPT (time based one time password) application such as Google Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator, Authy, or FreeOTP.

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use vim to remove duplicates

I just love how some features of vim are so discoverable and memorable once you really start to grasp it. Sorting and uniqing your files or ranges is one of those examples for me.

" sort the file :sort " sort the file only keeping unique lines :sort u " sort a range :'<,'> sort " sort a range only keeping unique lines :'<,'> sort u

I recently used this to dedupe my autogenerated links section for rich-syntax-range-style. More often I am using it to sort and uniqify objects like arrays and lists.

Here is what the markdown looks like.

* [py-tree-sitter](https://github.com/tree-sitter/py-tree-sitter) * [rich](https://github.com/Textualize/rich) * [@textualizeio](https://twitter.com/textualizeio) * [rich](https://github.com/Textualize/rich) * [another post](https://waylonwalker.com/designing-kedro-router) *...

vimgrep open buffers

How to vimgrep over hidden files.

I needed to delete all build pipeline steps that were named upload docs. I currently have about 60 projects running from the same template all running very similar builds. In the past I’ve scripted out migrations for large changes like this, they involved writing a python script that would load the yaml file into a dictionary, find the corresponding steps make the change and write it back out.

Today’s job was much simplar, just delete the step, were all steps are surrounded by newlines. My first thought was to just open all files in vim and run dap. I just needed to get these files:positions into my quickfix. My issue is that all the builds reside within hidden directories by convention.

variability

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vim
markata 0.3.0 is 15-20% faster

image from Dall-e

a sprinter edging out his opponent by Dall-e

It’s about time to release Markata 0.3.0. I’ve had 8 pre-releases since the last release, but more importantly it has about 3 months of updates. Many of which are just cleaning up bad practices that were showing up as hot spots on my pyinstrument reports

Markata started off partly as a python developer frustrated with using nodejs for everything, and a desire to learn how to make frameworks in pluggy. Little did I know how flexible pluggy would make it. It started out just as my blog...

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name it claim it aim it

People exceptionally talented in the Deliberative theme are best described by the serious care they take in making decisions or choices. They anticipate obstacles.

I am risk-adverse. I want everything well thought out and calculated before I make any sort of change. I have never gambled in my life and just the thought of it makes me anxious.

I can use this as a strength to plan out potential issues and prevent them. I do this quite often with my role in infrastructure.

I need to make sure that I use deadlines to keep this as a strength and not hinderence.

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get the version of any python package | python api

A common meta thing that I need in python is to find the version of a package. Most of the time I reach for package_name.__version__, but that does not always work.

In searching the internet for an answer nearly every one of them pointed me to __version__. This works for most projects, but is simply a convention, its not required. Not all projects implement a __version__, but most do. I’ve never seen it lie to me, but there is nothing stopping someone from shipping mismatched versions.

I appreciate it

While its not required its super handy and easy for anyone to remember off the top of their head. It makes it easy to start debugging differences between what you have vs what you see somewhere else. You can do this by dropping a __version__ variable inside your __init__.py file.

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