Plurrrr

Joe Armstrong, one of the creators of Erlang, once described Erlang as the quest for programs that you “write once, run forever.” Nix, in comparison, might be the quest for programs that run wherever, whenever. Nix often scares newcomers and experienced devs alike, because it proposes a fairly radical overhaul to how we think about package management and how we run software in general. In this post, I’m going to illustrate which problems Nix solves and argue that this change in perspective has profound implications for software tooling.

Virtual Environments are isolated Python environments that have their own site-packages. Basically, it means that each virtual environment has its own set of dependencies to third-party packages usually installed from PyPI.

Virtual environments are helpful if you develop multiple Python projects on the same machine. Also, when you distribute your Python code to others or on servers, virtual environments come in very handy to reproducibly create the same environment as on your development machine.

Today, we’ll learn

• which tools exist to create isolated environments
• which tools help with package management in Python projects

Go 1.18 is coming out soon, hopefully in a few weeks. It's a huge release with a lot to look forward to, but native fuzzing has a special place in my heart. (I'm super-biased of course: before I left Google, I worked with Katie Hockman and Roland Shoemaker to build the fuzzing system). Generics are cool too, I guess, but having fuzzing integrated into the testing package and go test will make fuzz testing more accessible to everyone which makes it easier to write secure, correct code in Go.

Not much has been written yet on how Go's fuzzing system actually works, so I'll talk a bit about that here. If you'd like to try it out, Getting started with fuzzing is a great tutorial.