#210 — Mar 25, 2026 by Evan Chen

Trailing commas being forbidden in JSON drives me nuts. I hope Python gets TOML 1.1 support into a builtin module soon, for now I have to keep including it as a dependency.

#209 — Mar 25, 2026 by Evan Chen

Isn't fate pull such a good command name?

#208 — Mar 24, 2026 by Evan Chen

On the litellm attack:

We discovered it when the package was pulled in as a transitive dependency by an MCP plugin running inside Cursor. The .pth launcher spawns a child Python process via subprocess.Popen, but because .pth files trigger on every interpreter startup, the child re-triggers the same .pth — creating an exponential fork bomb that crashed the machine. The fork bomb is actually a bug in the malware.

(Passed to me by a work colleague.)

#207 — Mar 23, 2026 by Evan Chen

Man, I can just like, upload whatever I want to PyPI and it's great.

#206 — Mar 22, 2026 by Evan Chen

I really want to like biome, but having to have a configuration file to cause it to use spaces over tabs (the default for prettier) isn't great. I don't have .prettierrc and don't really want to start with biome.json either.

#205 — Mar 21, 2026 by Evan Chen

What does it say about me that tinkering with CI is more addictive than Netflix?

#204 — Mar 21, 2026 by Evan Chen

python -m http.server is such a nice built-in command and I wish I knew about it like ten years ago

#203 — Mar 20, 2026 by Evan Chen

I think I have an unhealthy addiction to setting up CI.

#202 — Mar 19, 2026 by Evan Chen

Are people really so slow at reading emails that having an LLM summarize the email for them is useful? I can't imagine not preferring to just read the original.

#201 — Mar 18, 2026 by Evan Chen

we learned that apparently the actual purpose of MOP was to mine OTIS diamonds buried deep within the earth

that has got to be one of the quotes of all time

#200 — Mar 17, 2026 by Evan Chen

all i want for christmas is django support for ty

#199 — Mar 16, 2026 by Evan Chen

Appreciated this paragraph from gasche:

The policy that I proposed has been described to me as:

• disturbingly anti-AI by people who are very positive about AI usage for programming
• disturbingly pro-AI by people who are very negative about AI usage for programming

My immodest take-away from these conflicting sentiments is that the proposed policy is in fact reasonably balanced.

#198 — Mar 16, 2026 by Evan Chen

I think I would have liked to have a teacher like Dijkstra.

#197 — Mar 16, 2026 by Evan Chen

Reading ocaml PR 14369 generates so much entertainment value for me every time.

#196 — Mar 15, 2026 by Evan Chen

Actually one of my favorite parts of the MOSP hunt is the rec letter in the Epilogue of Chapter 1.

#195 — Mar 14, 2026 by Evan Chen

Are these log messages too snarky?

log "♻️  RELOAD TRIGGERED. Every day I'm shuffling 🔀"
# …
log "☀️  GOOD MORNING, my glorious webmaster! How are you this fine $(date +"%A in %B")?"
log "🩷 Please enjoy these logs, I wrote them just for you 💌🖋️"

#194 — Mar 14, 2026 by Evan Chen

why do i push updates to production right before going to bed on a Friday night isn't that just asking for trouble

#193 — Mar 11, 2026 by Evan Chen

oh it's almost april 1 which means it's time for me to decide on a new career

#192 — Mar 11, 2026 by Evan Chen

I'm always reminded of this sentence in esr's how to ask questions

When asking your question, it is best to write as though you assume you are doing something wrong, even if you are privately pretty sure you have found an actual bug. If there really is a bug, you will hear about it in the answer. Play it so the maintainers will want to apologize to you if the bug is real, rather than so that you will owe them an apology if you have messed up.

I feel like I always did this, and it just seemed like common sense to me. In fact, I assumed that's what everyone did. But apparently not?

#191 — Mar 11, 2026 by Evan Chen

It's pretty nice that most of the museums in Washington DC are free.