Trying to Help Other Learn Programming

Trying to Help Other Learn Programming

Having worked in the industry for a very long time, sometimes I forget how much I have learned (and forgotten) over the years. What seems trivial now, was once a complex idea that I had to wrap my head around, and after learning the fundamentals, there always seemed to be more to learn. This was at, in my mind, a golden age for learning computer systems and how to code. Installing Linux was not what it is today with flashing installers and disk configurators. Heck, X-windows did not start by default and you had to fiddle with configuration setting for ages to get a gui environment…

Continue Reading Trying to Help Other Learn Programming

Should I stop work on CfnMason or any project?

Off and on for years, and at various companies, I have developed various tools to manage complex AWS CloudFormation templates and stacks. This came out of the lack of tooling that was associated with CloudFormation itself. It was not that CFN was bad, (it is notoriously picky) it is just that it was designed with the intention of being a way to treat your infrastructure in code based manner. That is really not true. CFN was created as a templating language with defined spec. Because of these limitations, I have built closed and open source solutions to manage the complexities that involve working with CloudFormation. Recently…

Continue Reading Should I stop work on CfnMason or any project?

How to configure environment for Python Poetry based project.

How do I get started? I recently switched over to Poetry as a package manager for my project CfnMason. ( CfnMason is a tool related to CloudFormation stack management, but you can read about that on the Readme as it is updated. ) The question is, how do you use Poetry when you are working on a project across multiple machines and operating systems. I guess I am going to attempt to address the issue. So, you want to join a project, or work on a project that is using the Poetry dependency management tool. Great! But, how do you get the requirements setup for the…

Continue Reading How to configure environment for Python Poetry based project.

Setting up the cfnmason project for Python

Cfnmason is yet another tool that can be used to manipulate cloudformation stacks. It is not designed to be a replacement for CloudFormation like Terraform, but as a means of making building and managing them easier. I had written a version of this ages ago in Ruby, but with most of my work now being in Python, I am creating a new version in Python. As I have never created an exportable Python package, this will track the process of building and releasing a new PyPi package. Oh, and to keep things interesting, I am doing this on a mix of Windows 10 and Linux. Creating…

Continue Reading Setting up the cfnmason project for Python

How do I setup a new python project?

Python prides itself on there only being one best way of doing things. However, if you have ever had the desire to create a package that can be distributed in python, then you may have run into some frustration. Out of the box, there does not appear to be a single clear concise way of creating a new project. After hearing over and over again, that the correct way in Python should be obvious, in this area, it seems that this is definitely not the case. There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.-- Zen of Python However, it does seem…

Continue Reading How do I setup a new python project?