This text was originally published on Mar 21, 2019 on my personal blog.

This quickstart guide shows you how to get your local development environment up and running according to what I feel is, currently, the most practical and productive setup to run App Engine and Datastore. This approach still uses dev_appserver.py as its development server, mainly because it still ships a Datastore GUI. In addition, it shows some of the differences introduced on the new runtime on how a project should be structured. For example, how deal with the new app.yml, requirements.txt, etc.

Even though, Google App Engine’s new approach is dropping the use of dev_appserver.py, I find really hard to develop anything without it. At least not until another Datastore Emulator GUI is available - see discussion here. You'll see how messy it gets when you are developing a continuously growing DB. Dealing with that situation in the dark - without being able to consult your data and validating its consistency - is basically begging for a bad time. I also judge to be a bad move to use the real Datastore in your development environment as you can eat up your quotas and mess with your production data. …

This text was originally published on Feb 15, 2019 on my personal blog.

Today I’ll briefly discuss some of the differences between the new Google App Engine Standard Python Runtime versions: 2.7 and 3.7. Recently, I faced some trouble while upgrading some of my applications. So I thought I would compile this short journey along the way. In this post I’ll basically comment the key changes; in a follow up post I’ll exemplify the new environment by setting up a local development sandbox along with a basic project using Django e Google Datastore.

Why?

Python 2 has had a good run. Unfortunately its support will be dropped on January 1st, 2020 as stated on the PEPs 373 and 404. But fear not my fellow lover of the programming arts, we are excellent hands with Python 3 for at least the year 2024 (PEP 569). For that reason many influent libraries and frameworks are also following this trend. They are stopping the support on their Python 2 flavor and going full Python 3. This is no exception to the Google Cloud. Well, to be honest, there’s a lot of functionality still lacking support on the Python 3 counterpart. I don’t blame them; it’s impressive the amount of code and documentation they support. I assume they will take their time rolling this upgrade. …

In this post you’ll see how to bypass the App Engine Client Libraries’ authentication step by mocking the credentials object on a Python app. This will keep you from unnecessarily leaving user credentials lying around if you’re only working with services that can be emulated locally.

There is curious thing that happens when you’re dealing with Google’s App Engine Client libraries on a local development environment. They require authentication even when connecting to a development emulator; for example, the Datastore Emulator. And I don’t mean it checks for authentication when starting dev_appserver.py or when the client library is instantiated in your Python code; I mean in every call. Every single query to Datastore, for instance, triggers a authentication check inside the library. …

In this article, you’ll get acquainted with the Yocto Project (YP): a powerful set of tools for creating and building completed Linux embedded systems. After a quick discussion on the tool itself, there’s a tutorial on how to use Yocto to build the Angstrom Distribution from source to run on a Raspberry Pi 3.

The Yocto Project

The best way to get what Yocto is is to understand the problem it is trying to solve. Generating Linux systems can be astronomically complex if you try to do it manually. You can always search online for a prepackaged distro and see if it fits your needs. …