pawamoy's website

Sunsetting the Insiders program

Timothée Mazzucotelli — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In April 2023 I announced the launch of a sponsorware program called Insiders, for mkdocstrings and other projects of mine. After two years and a half, I reached a bit more than a thousand dollar in monthly sponsorships, meaning two goals were completed, the $500 and $1000 goals, and their 20 associated features and projects released to the public. Today I'm sunsetting the Insiders program, for a few reasons listed below.

Same Pytest fixtures with different scopes

Timothée Mazzucotelli — Wed, 01 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

How to use the same Pytest fixtures with different scopes, to prevent slowing down your test suite?

![same pytest fixtures with different scopes](../assets/pytest-fixtures.png)

The tingling sensation of witnessing your own existence

Timothée Mazzucotelli — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I sometimes have a tingling sensation, a soft and warm chill flowing from the top of my spine up to my skull, when looking at someone using something that belongs to me (a physical object or something I created, like code).

Do you too?

Playing Steam VR games running on Linux in the Oculus Quest 2 through ALVR (wireless)

Timothée Mazzucotelli — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A few days ago I was finally able to setup my Linux computer and Oculus Quest 2 to play some Steam VR games wirelessly. It tooks me several attempts over many months, and it was one of the most complicated process I had to discover and follow. So I figured I would share a small step-by-step guide to help others.

Even though the process was painful for me at times, I would like to make it clear that the ALVR and SideQuest teams and their community have nothing to do with that: they are doing an amazing job and I'm very thankful for that.

![steam linux alvr quest2](../assets/quest2.png)

The Insiders journey

Timothée Mazzucotelli — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This post will embark you on my journey about making a living off my open source projects. I'm still at the beginning of the journey, but there is already a lot to say and I wanted to share my experience. I like the idea of keeping a journal of what I go through, and who knows, maybe it will help or inspire others.

In this post I write a bit about me, but I also provide technical instructions on how to set things up.

![the insiders journey](../assets/insiders-journey.png)

Adding links to a Black formatted, Pygments syntax highlighted Python code block

Timothée Mazzucotelli — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

One of the features of [mkdocstrings-python] is its ability to automatically render cross-references to objects of the documented package in code block signatures.

Adding links to code blocks is possible in HTML, but doing so while preserving Pygments syntax highlighting and Black formatting was not an easy task. This post explains how it works.

![adding links to formatted and syntax highlighted code](../assets/codeblock.png)

Somewhat-modern Python

Timothée Mazzucotelli — Thu, 22 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In this post I present my latest project template for Python projects, copier-pdm, based on the great Copier.

This parodic title was inspired by the "Hypermodern Python" article series by Claudio Jolowicz. Indeed, my Python development setup has parts that could considered modern by some, and old-school by others, so I found it funny to call it "more-or-less modern".

Testing a FastAPI application using Ormar models and Alembic migrations

Timothée Mazzucotelli — Sun, 28 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In the previous post I showed how to add Alembic migrations to an existing FastAPI + Ormar project. In this post we will see how to write unit tests for such applications.

![testing fastapi ormar alembic apps](../assets/alembic_post.png)

How to add Alembic migrations to an existing FastAPI + Ormar project

Timothée Mazzucotelli — Sun, 13 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I had trouble adding an ON DELETE CASCADE constraint to foreign keys after they were already created, so here's a small post explaning how I did it. This specific constraint, ON DELETE CASCADE, is not relevant here. This post will help you for any kind of change you want to apply on database already used in production.

![add alembic migrations to existing fastapi ormar project](../assets/alembic_post.png)

Local HTTP server sending fake files for testing purposes

Timothée Mazzucotelli — Sun, 15 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I have developed a Python client/library for aria2 called aria2p.

To test my code, I spawn aria2c processes to interact with them and see if everything works correctly. I know I could mock the calls, but I feel like actually testing the interaction between my client and aria2c is a better way to ensure my code does its best.

Until recently the test suite fed actual downloads to aria2c (like Linux distributions ISOs, metalinks, magnets, or torrents), but of course the inevitable happened: some URLs broke.

So I decided to go full local. This post describes my attempt at spawning local HTTP servers to serve fake/virtual files efficiently, files that are then fed to aria2c.

![local http server fake files testing purposes](../assets/local-http-server.png)

Passing Makefile arguments to a command, as they are typed in the command line.

Timothée Mazzucotelli — Sat, 17 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In my Python projects, I use a combination of Duty (my task runner) and make.

My Makefile declares the same tasks as the ones written in duties.py, but in a generic manner:

```Makefile TASKS = check test release

.PHONY: $(TASKS) $(TASKS): @poetry run duty $@ ```

So, instead of running poetry run duty check, I can run make check. Convenient, right?

Except that some duties (tasks) accept arguments. For example:

bash poetry run duty release version=0.1.2

So how do I allow the make equivalent?

bash make release version=0.1.2

Python packages and plugins as namespace packages

Timothée Mazzucotelli — Sun, 11 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A user of mkdocstrings wrote a Crystal handler for their own use-case. They asked on the Gitter channel if we could allow to load external handlers, so they don't have to fork the project and install the fork, but rather just install their lightweight package containing just the handler.

We both saw Python namespace packages as good candidates, so I experimented a bit, and here are my conclusions.

How to edit the contents of a git commit

Timothée Mazzucotelli — Sun, 04 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

When you type change git commit or similar keywords in a search engine, you find many answers explaning how to rewrite a commit message, but not how to actually modify the contents of the commit.

This post quickly explains how to do that.

![howto edit git commit contents](../assets/edit-commit3.png)

Migrate Disqus comments to Utterances (in GitHub issues) with Python

Timothée Mazzucotelli — Sun, 13 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

When I replaced Jekyll and my Jekyll-ReadTheDocs theme with MkDocs and a blog-customised version of the Material for MkDocs theme, the URLs of my posts changed.

I was using Disqus for comments, and they provide a way to migrate threads from old URLs to new URLs. Unfortunately, this time it didn't work for some reason (I had already done it once in the past and it worked fine).

I've read more and more criticism about Disqus related to privacy, so I looked at a replacement. The Disqus thread migration was not working so it was the perfect occasion!

I've read a few webpages and got interested in Isso. Unfortunately again, I did not manage to install it on my Raspberry Pi.

So I went with a much simpler solution: Utterances. You basically enable a GitHub app on your repository, add a script in your posts pages, and voilà: your new comment section powered by GitHub issues.

![migrate disqus comments to utterances github](../assets/comments.png)

How to deal with spacing in Jinja2 templates

Timothée Mazzucotelli — Tue, 01 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It started with a comment in a GitHub issue.

I often find it difficult to wrangle spacing jinja2 templates especially around optional clauses.

I couldn't wrap my head either about this. So I decided to write a script and test every combination of newlines, indentation and dashes or no dashes in {%-, with the goal being to find combinations that will not have an extra middle line when an optional Jinja clause is false.

Unify Python logging for a Gunicorn/Uvicorn/FastAPI application

Timothée Mazzucotelli — Tue, 02 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I recently started playing with FastAPI and HTTPX, and I am deploying my app with Gunicorn and Uvicorn workers.

But when serving, the logs from each component looks quite different from the others. I want them to all look the same, so I can easily read them or exploit them in something like Kibana.

After a lot of hours trying to understand how Python logging works, and how to override libraries' logging settings, here is what I have...

![unify logging for a gunicorn uvicorn app](../assets/gunicorn_logs.png)

Save the logs generated during a pytest run as a job artifact on GitLab/GitHub CI

Timothée Mazzucotelli — Thu, 17 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

While I was writing tests for one of my latest project, aria2p, I noticed that some tests that were passing on my local machine were now failing on the GitLab CI runner.

I decided I needed to write all exceptions to log files so I could inspect what happened on GitLab.

![save pytest logs as artifact gitlab ci](../assets/loguru.png)

Challenge: fill a 2D space with one continuous line doing 90° angle turns in the same direction (left/right)

Timothée Mazzucotelli — Fri, 01 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Last night I was doing that in my head: filling a 2D space with one continuous line doing turns at a 90° angle, always in the same direction. Other people do this as well, right?

Well, today I actually drawn it:

![challenge fill space one line 90 degree same direction](../assets/fill-space-drawing.jpg)

Django application as an authentication / authorization server for Shiny

Timothée Mazzucotelli — Thu, 15 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

As you may know, [Shiny Server] comes in two versions: open-source and professional. The professional adds security and authentication features like password protected applications, and controlled access via SSL and LDAP, Active Directory, Google OAuth, PAM, proxied authentication, or passwords. If you need these authentication features but don't want or can't spend [$9,995 per year] for the professional edition, then I got a solution for you!

![django auth server for shiny](../assets/client-server-architecture.png)

How to install NVidia drivers on BunsenLabs/Debian 8 to setup dual screens

Timothée Mazzucotelli — Fri, 09 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Honestly, this post is mostly a personal memo. I will NOT go through this again!