My dearest gentlest readers,

It's yet another fortnight before us!

I hope your year started off with you hitting the ground running; whether your pace was a sloth pace or a cheetah pace, what matters is you kept pushing and moving forward.

A little bit of good news: I will be speaking at PyCascades 2025, taking place in Portland on the 9th of February. I am thrilled to be speaking at a conference with people who love purple as much as I do! Get your tickets and see you there!

Visuals are eye candy; that is why data visualization works to help people understand complex information. Learn about the most underrated tool in engineering.

API design is a part of system design that entails building services and libraries that communicate and share data with each other. Understanding how this works as well as best practices is a skill that every developer should have.

We are constantly hearing about how different companies have experienced security breaches in their platforms. Are you wondering how you can create a security tool that helps identify vulnerabilities in web applications? Freecodecamp recently shared this blog post that scratches this exact itch in Python.

Looking for tools to use while implementing DevOps in your team? This article by Pulumi goes through the tools that will be of service to you in the long term in terms of infrastructure and other solutions that can grow as the team grows. The article also shares an example of a simple service monitor and capturer.

Learning and implementing data structures might be daunting; however, this VSCode extension allows you to visualize what your data structure is doing as you go, to keep things interesting and less daunting.

The majority of us have built and dockerized applications based off of public Python packages. The question is how this would look if we used a private package and still wanted to dockerize our app. This article looks at exactly that.

Fundamentals of how to become a good backend engineer.

Debugging without logging can be a nightmare; that is why we use Structlog to log, in Python. And you can use it too. Here is a comprehensive guide to help you implement Structlog.

To better understand system design concepts as well as prepare for any interviews you may have in the future, this is a list of cheatsheets that contain the common concepts that show up in a majority of the interviews.

GitHub Actions has automated workflows, which has made it faster and cheaper to manage applications. Check out this article on how to use Python with Github Actions.

MacOS users recently experienced a bug where Docker could not be accessed due to a false malware alert. An alternative to using Docker Desktop, and a faster one at that, is Orbstack.

The word of the day is deus ex machina. A deus ex machina refers to a thing that suddenly enters the story in a novel, play, movie, etc, and solves a problem that had previously seemed impossible to solve.

Example in a sentence:

In the Manifest, the Tv Show, the unexplained disappearance and reappearance of Flight 828, along with the passengers' subsequent receipt of 'callings' that guide them to prevent tragedies, could be seen as a recurring deus ex machina, constantly resolving seemingly impossible situations and guiding the characters towards a predetermined fate.

I am making my grand departure into the unknown.

Until the next fortnight, my treasured reader, go forth, and may the odds ever be in your favour!