Tag Archives: uv

Month notes

October 2024 month notes

For small notes, links and thoughts see my Prose blog.

Web Components versus frameworks

Internet drama erupted over Web Components in what felt a needless way. Out of what often felt wasted effort there were some good insights Lea Verou had a good overview of the situation, along with an excellent line about standards work being “product work on hard mode”

Chris Ferdinandi had a good response talking about how web components and reactive frameworks can be used together in a way that emphasises their strengths.

One of my favourite takes on the situation was by Cory LaViska who pointed out that framework designers are perhaps not the best people to declare the future of the platform.

Web Components are a threat to the peaceful, proprietary way of life for frameworks that have amassed millions of users — the majority of web developers.

His call to iterate on the standard and try to have common parts to today’s competing implementations was echoed in Lea’s post.

The huge benefit of Web Components is interoperability: you write it once, it works forever, and you can use it with any framework (or none at all). It makes no sense to fragment efforts to reimplement e.g. tabs or a rating widget separately for each framework-specific silo, it is simply duplicated busywork.

The current Balkanisation of component frameworks is really annoying and it is developer’s fear and tribalism that has allowed it to happen and which has sustained it.

Postgres generated UUIDs

In my work I’ve often seen UUIDs be generated in the application layer and pushed into the database. I tried this in a hobby project this month and rapidly came to the conclusion that it is very tedious when you can just have the database handle it. In Postgres a generated UUID can just be the column default and I don’t think I’m going to do anything else in future if I have a choice about it.

Python 3.13

I’ve started converting my projects to the new Python version and it seems really fast and snappy even on projects that have a lazy container spin-up. I haven’t done any objective benchmarking but things just feel more responsive than 3.11.

I’m going to have a push to set this as the baseline for all my Python projects. For my Fly projects extracting out the Python version number as a Docker variable has meant migrating has been as simple as switching the version number so far.

For the local projects I’ve also been trying to use asdf for tool versioning more consistently and it has made upgrading easier where I’ve adopted it but it seems I have quite a few places where I still need to convert from either language specific tools or nothing.

uvx

uvx is part of the uv project and I started using it this month and its rapidly becoming my default way to run Python CLIs. The first thing I started using it with was pg-cli but I found myself using it to quickly run pytest over some quick scripting code I’d done as well as running ad-hoc formatters and tools. It’s quick and really handy.

There’s still the debate about whether the Python community should go all-in on uv, looking at the messy situation in Node where all manner of build and packaging tools could potentially be used (despite the ubiquity of npm) the argument for having a single way to package and run things is strong.

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Month notes

August 2024 month notes

Co-pilot

Ever late to the party I’ve finally been using AI assisted coding on a work project. It’s been a really interesting experience, sometimes helpful and sometimes maddening.

Among the positives are that it was easy to get the LLM to translate between different number systems like rgb and hex or pixels, rems and Tailwind units.

It was pretty good at organising code according to simple rules like lexical sorting but it was defeated by organising imports according to linting rules. This makes it a great tool for organising crufty code that hasn’t been cared for in a while and has often been more powerful than pure AST-based refactoring.

At one point it correctly auto-populated stub airport code data into a test data structure which felt that something I hadn’t seen in assistance before.

It also helped my write a bash script in a fraction of the time it would normally take. The interesting thing here was that I know a reasonable amount of bash but can never remember the proper bracketing and spacing. Although I tweaked every line that was produced it was much quicker than Googling the correct syntax or running and repeating.

What wasn’t so great was that the interaction between the Co-pilot and Intellisense suggestions aren’t really differentiated in the UI so it was really unclear what completions are the result of reflection or inference from the code and which ones are based on probability. If you’re having a field name suggested then that should only be via reflection in my view. All too often the completion resulted in an immediate check error due to the field having a slightly different name or not existing at all.

I’m almost at the point of switching off Co-pilot suggestions because they aren’t accurate enough right now.

Would I pay for this myself right now? No, I don’t think this iteration has the right UX and ability to understand the context of the code. However there will be a price point that is right in the future for things like the script writing.

Atuin

I started a new job recently and probably the most useful tool I’ve used since starting is Atuin which gives you a searchable shell history. I’ll probably write up more about my new shell setup but I think being able to pull back commands quickly has made it massively easier to cope with a new workflow and associated commands and tools.

Form Data

This little web standards built-in was the best thing to happen to my hobby coding this month. I can’t believe I’ve gone this long without having ever used it. You can pass it a DOM reference and access the contents of the form programmatically or you can construct and instance and pass it along to a fetch call.

It’s incredibly useful and great for using in small frontends.

Reading list

Gotchas in using SQLite in production: https://blog.pecar.me/sqlite-prod

Practical SVG has been published for free on the internet after publisher A Book Apart stopped distributing its catalogue.

Let’s bring about the end of countless hand-rolled debounce functions: https://github.com/whatwg/dom/issues/1298

Python packaging tool uv had a major release this month. Simon Willison shared a number of interesting observations over at the Lobsters thread on the release. I’m still uncertain about the wisdom of trying to fund developer tooling with venture capital, I don’t believe the returns are there, however I did come round to people’s arguments that the tools could be brought into community stewardship if needed. Thinking of recent licensing forks the argument seems persuasive.

I currently happily mimbling along with pipenv but I need to update some hobby apps to Python 3.12/3.13 soon so I think I’m going to give uv a go and see what happens.

I also started a small posts blog this month so I’m probably going to post these items there in the future.

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