Very Simple Function Mocking with PyTest

Apparently TDD is the way to to modern software development. I say that facetiously, TDD is the ONLY way to do software development!! However, I often find that writing the tests end up taking way more work and is way more complicated than writing the code itself, but mostly that's …

Postgres Schema Diffs

We are about to roll out some of our new stuff to a production-like staging server, exciting times! One of the lessons we did NOT learn early enough is that if you're not going to automate your database changes, you really need to keep on top of organising them!

As …

Controlling the Flask-SQLAlchemy engine

So this week I was fiddling around with some database connection settings. We use Flask-SQLAlchemy as our ORM for our Flask project but have been experiencing some random socket timeouts when we push to our AWS dev environment.

It looked a bit like the database connection was going away, but …

Docker Hints - Poke a Stopped Container

I am in a situation at the moment where I am trying to install a custom Python package into my little app, but for reasons yet to be determined, it's installing into the wrong directory.

Everything we do is Dockerised, which is great til a container crashes and you really …

UpFront Conference 2019

Last week I attended UpFrontConf in Manchester and well, it was awesome.

I am lucky(!) enough to live far far away from Manchester these days, so had to travel up the day before. This meant I could attend the also awesome Before UpFront meetup event at LEAF, featuring the delightful …

The Prime Directive