Once in a while I look at a sampling of recent dpaste activity. Partly I do it so I’m not totally out of touch with what my site contains. Partly I do it because it’s just interesting.
And I do it to confirm that the site is actually used by people who want to share code snippets, not just spambots who fire their cannons into every porthole.
I just sampled 10 random items from the last week. Happily, no spam. Here’s what I saw:
A step-by-step guide from real life
.tar.xz format.brew install xzxz --decompress darktable-1.4.2.tar.xzcd darktable-1.4.2./build.sh --prefix /opt/darktable --buildtype Releasebrew install cmakebrew install glibbrew install gtkbrew install gtk againbrew install webpbrew install lensfunbuild.sh again… fail, needs rsvg2SPAMMER WHOSE COMMENT GENERATOR IS BROKEN commented :
In July, I switched from OS X to Ubuntu as my workday environment. For three years my personal MacBook Air had been pulling double duty, personal computer plus workstation at my job (each role with its respective user on the box). When the combined demands for disk space exceeded the 250GB SSD, I took that as a sign that it was time for a change. I work outside my office enough that an external HD wasn’t a practical solution, and a USB key is too slow.
Recently I switched my work environment from OS X to Ubuntu (a post on that project is in the works).
For years I’ve been using the standard Apple Keychain app, which has several points in its favor: it’s included with the OS, it integrates well with a lot of applications, and is not trying to “freemium” me into a paid tier. However, it’s OS X only, which meant I had to find something new.
Eight years ago, I launched a simple pastebin site written in Django.
In those early Django days I spent a lot of time in the #django IRC channel. I thought we should have a pastebin that knew how to correctly colorize our code, and which was written in our framework to boot. So I wrote one. Eventually its URL ended up in the channel topic, then in the Django source code itself.
Over the years, changes have been minimal. I switched from a Javascript-powered colorizer to Pygments. I added an API. I fixed things that broke. Mostly I just kept it running and usable. (I’ll also note that many excellent new pastebins were created in those years as well.)
O’Reilly Media recently asked in their “Programming Today” newsletter:
For many old-school software engineers, developing code has always been as much an art as a science. But as the industry focuses more on practices such as Test-Driven Development, and Patterns become the lingua franca of programming, is there any room left for real creativity in coding? Or, has it become an exercise in cookie-cutter production, putting together components in new ways, but without any real room for individual style? Share your thoughts with us…
A little-known bit of trivia about our book, Python Web Development with Django: we wrote the manuscript in Markdown.
I think it was my idea. One of the major motivations for using a text-based format – versus the unfortunate de facto standard, Microsoft Word – was integration with good developer tools and workflow.
Our manuscript and all our project code was in a Subversion repo, so each author always had the latest updates. HTML generated from the Markdown files was great for generating nice printed/printable output too.