Roundup for week ending April 28th

Authored on 2024-04-28

This is a roundup of notable things I did or read that are worth mentioning.

Talk proposal: PyGrunn accepted, EuroPython rejected

I've been on hiatus from public speaking since roughly 2015, when a combination of personal and work events derailed my confidence to the point where attending a meetup took unreasonable amount of effort. 9 years since the last time I've given a talk outside of work environment feels like a really long time so I hope I can tell a compelling story.

It did take a tremendous amount of effort to squeeze out measly 20 lines required for a proposal (abstract + outline + speaker bio), so I really hope anxiety will not take the best of me when preparing for PyGrunn.

Tried rye

I tried Rye as part of my ongoing attempt to automate as many things-without-public-API with Playwright. Wait, that's missing a couple of logic steps in there.

I am trying to automate expense reporting and categorizing for my ever growing number of financial accounts (e.g. banks, mortgage providers, investment platforms, etc) and have a small TUI tool written in Rust (which itself leverages Ratatui). Nothing too fancy except of course there's the tedious task of collecting the "input data" from all those sources and it is a major pain in the ass as it requires a lot of precise mouse-driven navigation. To remedy that I have decided to automate this process with Playwright. I've previously used Playwright to automate filing timesheets and expense forms at work because the user experience was that dire, but I've used Poetry instead. So this time I've tried Rye.

And... it's nothing spectacular and just works. It's a boring tool and boring tools are good.

Poetry bug

Speaking of packaging tools, ran into a spectacularly hard to debug issue with Poetry. I think it deserves a separate blog post in itself, but in essence it was a combination of these (one, two) bugs plus a red herring in the form of our work instance of Artifactory getting a major version bump. It didn't help that users reporting bugs to our team had wildly different symptoms and system setups.

In all honesty, these kinds of issues become incredibly hard to debug as there are so many moving parts and narrowing down the culprit is a like chasing a piece of paper in a storm -- technically possible but highly unlikely to succeed.

That said, Poetry is still the tool of choice at work, I don't think we've accumulated enough grievances to move away from it.

Coming to grips with Ansible

I've finally come to the point where I have enough devices¹ to justify having a proper Ansible setup. This means having a playbook, proper inventory and mayhaps even some roles. Seeing as I only get an hour or so in a day to actually wrap my head around all of these concepts, the progress has been slow. To be quite frank, I'd prefer something along the lines of Terraform OpenTofu, something a touch more declarative which also tracks the state of the target but alas, this may never be unless there's some way providers can leverage SSH connections.

On utilization (of people)

Interesting article I came across scrolling through fediverse timeline. While old it seems quite relevant to how "improving resource utilization" is becoming the go-to mode of operation for senior management in larger companies. I just hope it's a temporary trend.