Victoria Drake's Blog

How to choose and care for a secure open source project

How to choose and care for a secure open source project

There is a rather progressive sect of the software development world that believes that most people would be a lot happier and get a lot more work done if they just stopped building things that someone else has already built and is offering up for free use.

open-source  8 min read

SQLite in production with WAL

SQLite in production with WAL

Update: read the HackerNews discussion. SQLite (“see-quell-lite”) is a lightweight Sequel, or Structured Query Language (SQL), database engine. Instead of using the client-server database management system model, SQLite is self-contained in a single file.

data  4 min read

Multithreaded Python: slithering through an I/O bottleneck

Multithreaded Python: slithering through an I/O bottleneck

I recently developed a project that I called Hydra: a multithreaded link checker written in Python. Unlike many Python site crawlers I found while researching, Hydra uses only standard libraries, with no external dependencies like BeautifulSoup.

python  5 min read

Breaking bottlenecks 🍾

Breaking bottlenecks 🍾

I recently gave a lecture on the benefits of building non-blocking processes. This is a write-up of the full talk, minus any “ums” that may have occurred.

computing  12 min read

Command line tricks for managing your messy open source repository

Command line tricks for managing your messy open source repository

Effective collaboration, especially in open source software development, starts with effective organization. To make sure that nothing gets missed, the general rule, “one issue, one pull request” is a nice rule of thumb.

terminal  5 min read

The past ten years, or, how to get better at anything

The past ten years, or, how to get better at anything

If you want to get better at anything: Solve your own problems, Write about it, Teach others. 1. Searching, a decade ago I was a young graduate with newly-minted freedoms, and I was about to fall in love.

life  9 min read

Word bugs in software documentation and how to fix them

Word bugs in software documentation and how to fix them

I’ve been an editor longer than I’ve been a developer, so this topic for me is a real root issue. 🥁 When I see a great project with poorly-written docs, it hits close to /home.

docs  4 min read

The surprisingly difficult task of printing newlines in a terminal

The surprisingly difficult task of printing newlines in a terminal

Surprisingly, getting computers to give humans readable output is no easy feat. With the introduction of standard streams and specifically standard output, programs gained a way to talk to each other using plain text streams; humanizing and displaying stdout is another matter.

terminal  4 min read

Bash and shell expansions: lazy list-making

Bash and shell expansions: lazy list-making

It’s that time of year again! When stores start putting up colourful sparkly lit-up plastic bits, we all begin to feel a little festive, and by festive I mean let’s go shopping.

terminal  5 min read

A lightweight, tool-agnostic CI/CD flow with GitHub Actions

A lightweight, tool-agnostic CI/CD flow with GitHub Actions

Agnostic tooling is the clever notion that you should be able to run your code in various environments. With many continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD) apps available, agnostic tooling gives developers a big advantage: portability.

ci/cd  5 min read