Alyssa Coghlan

@ancoghlan
344 Followers
259 Following
1.5K Posts
CPython core developer, Python platform engineer for an Australian retail bank, cognitive science dabbler, secular humanist, charitably mercenary cynical idealist :)
Blog (mostly idle)https://www.curiousefficiency.org/
@xgranade It doesn't make the more general case easier to navigate, though (aside from making it clear that the condition "We'll only sponsor you if you stop all attempts to promote broader inclusion" is grounds for refusing a sponsorship).
@xgranade One notable qualitative difference between the strings attached grants in particular and problematic sponsors in general is that the former tried to dictate what the PSF was allowed to do beyond the scope of the specific grant, while the latter is more about the question "To what degree does continued visible association with problematic entities count as implicit (or explicit!) endorsement of the actions of those entities?". "No, not OK" is more obviously necessary in the first case.

Careful! She bytes 🐍

#CodeGals #Art #FediArt #MastoArt #Krita #DigitalArt

@inthehands David Agans "Debugging Rules!" is my one consistent recommendation to people wanting to improve the way they approach their problem solving.
@hugovk Just encountered the "Some of them have since joined the Python core team, so that’s a risk you must be willing to accept when signing up." line in the EP language summit FAQ. Nice :)
Huh, turns out I have zero photos of the first @pyconau education seminar. To be fair to past me, I did kinda have other priorities that day :)

Students: PyCon AU 2026 has subsidised tickets just for you. 🐍

Full conference: $300. Single day: $120. School, uni, and TAFE students all welcome.
Only 50 spots available, so don't sit on it.

🎟️ https://2026.pycon.org.au/tickets/

#PyConAU #Python #StudentDev

@b0rk Yeah, pretty much. There's an awful lot of documentation and code out there that doesn't describe its minimum version requirements or its platform or configuration limitations, so as soon as you deviate from "I'm running the most extensively used and/or documented version on the most common platform in the most common configuration", both LLMs and regular internet searches will feed you a lot of nonsense, but the LLM output often makes the problem less obvious.
Sometimes I wonder how much of my AI skepticism is fuelled by the fact that a decent chunk of $dayjob is getting tools originally written for Linux to play nice with Windows dev environments, so a significant subset of the documented functionality doesn't work (with no written caveats), and plenty of the publicly available example projects don't work either (since they assume execution from a Linux environment, where WSL itself qualifies, but a Windows client to a WSL service doesn't)

RE: https://mastodon.social/@gvwilson/116698825935930961

I remember reading a guerilla guide to empirical studies years ago - basically, what to do if you didn't have the time, money, or institutional support to do things the "right" way. Can't remember the title, can't find it underneath the piles of crap Google now layers on top of actual search results, but it was very pragmatic and clearly experience-based. If you have a pointer to it, I'd be grateful if you could share.