Python has many eyebrows-raising, weird “features” — from quirky behaviours to weird design choices, and borderline bugs… — From time to time, when coding, we all run into weird behaviours of the programming language. Sometimes it’s a “feature” we weren’t aware of, sometimes it’s just quirky behaviour of the language, and sometimes it’s borderline bug. …

Reflections and stats after writing more than 100 articles — Is it worth the time and effort and should you try writing too? — Couple days ago, I published my 100th article, so I feel like it’s time for reflections — looking at how I got there, what I learned along the way and whether it was actually worth the time and effort. …

Using PyStack’s “forbidden magic” to debug deadlocks, segmentation faults, crashes, and other difficult bugs in Python — There are certain bugs and issues that are very hard to troubleshoot. Just ask yourself, “How would I debug deadlock, segmentation fault, crashing application, or a hanging process?” Now, there’s a tool to help you will all of that — PyStack is a powerful new debugger that — according to…

How to replace etcd — the brain of a Kubernetes cluster — with PostgreSQL or any other RDBMS you want — etcd is the brain of every Kubernetes cluster, the key-value storage keeping track of all the objects in a cluster. It’s intertwined and tightly coupled with Kubernetes, and it might seem like an inseparable part of a cluster, or is it? In this article, we will explore how we could…

Set breakpoints, step through code, and interactively debug your Python applications running on Kubernetes with ease — Let’s imagine a situation — you have multiple Python applications running on Kubernetes that interact with each other. There’s a bug that you can’t reproduce locally, but it surfaces every time you hit a particular API endpoint. …

These are all the options you have in Python for running other processes — the bad, the good, and most importantly, the right way to do it — Python is a popular choice for automating anything and everything, that includes automating system administration tasks or tasks that require running other programs or interacting with the operating system. However, there are many ways to achieve this in Python, most of which are arguably bad.

True multi-core concurrency is coming to Python in 3.12 release and here’s how you can use it right now using sub-interpreter API — Python is 32 years old language, yet it still doesn’t have proper, true parallelism/concurrency. This is going to change soon, thanks to the introduction of a “Per-Interpreter GIL” (Global Interpreter Lock) which will land in Python 3.12. While the release of Python 3.12 …

Even though Python’s standard library comes with “batteries included,” it’s still missing some essentials… — Python is known to come with “batteries included,” thanks to its very extensive standard library, which includes many modules and functions that you would not expect to be there. …

Learn how you can run your own synthetic monitoring on your Kubernetes clusters without any expensive third-party tools and platforms — Synthetic monitoring can be a great tool for proactively identifying performance problems, checking the availability of servers, monitoring DNS resolution, and much more. However, when it comes to synthetic testing, engineers often rely on 3rd party platforms such as Datadog or New Relic that provide this type of monitoring. If…