MadeByMe

When you create a new social service on the internet, one of the things you need to think about is how to make a user’s space feel like their own. Services like GitHub, Roll20, or Reddit generate — or allow you to generate — a custom avatar (i.e. Identicons) for your account. Avatar auto-generation is especially neat, as it does not require any engagement from the user. Let’s try to figure that out on our own.

Some time ago, during a code review, I had a discussion with a colleague of mine about preferring dict() over {} in new Python code. They argued that dict() is more readable — and expresses intent more clearly — therefore should be preferred. I wasn’t convinced by that, but at that time I didn’t have any counterarguments, so I passed.

Yet that made me wonder: what’s the difference between the dict type and {} literal expression?

This blog is hosted on GitHub Pages. The service offers free static website hosting (TLS included!). The way it works is that GitHub issues a dedicated subdomain for each hosted website; for this one it’s: nathiss.github.io. However, if you try to access it you’ll be redirected to madebyme.today instead.

This entry has been inspired by Buster Benson’s Life in Weeks. The rules are very similar: each block represents a week in my life. More significant events are named and might have descriptions.

Recently I was tasked with initialization of a new Python project. One of the requirements was to prepare a changelog. I liked the idea, but my gut feeling was that the future project contributors won’t keep the changelog always up-to-date and it’s quality will decline over time. This article proposes a feature which enforces changelog updates, when it’s required to do so.