Russell Keith-Magee

Founding Apiarist on @PyBeeWare project. Former @DjangoProject Core Developer. Itinerant shaver of yaks. Subject to occasional, wild, enthusiastic rants.

Github: https://github.com/freakboy3742
Founder: https://beeware.org
Homepage: https://cecinestpasun.com

Public Key

npub1gfxk3mqt70hx3w5j6ackvl5cza68m8ldkna6svfln040e3s7mdgqj3gnlz

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsyyntgas9l8mngh2fdwutx06vpwaranlkmf7agxyleh6hucc0dk5qprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmntqyt8wumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnswf5k6ctv9ehx2aqpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68ytnwv46qlrukr3

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relay.momostr.pink

relay.primal.net

relay.nostr.net

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npub1gfxk3mqt70hx3w5j6ackvl5cza68m8ldkna6svfln040e3s7mdgqj3gnlz

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Last Notes

2026-06-26 07:50:40 UTC

Thesis: The surge in popularity of TUIs is not because there's been a sudden interest in retro computing. They're popular because they're an easy way to get a cross platform UI in an app experience.
Antithesis: There are other - and better - ways to achieve this goal. A good cross-platform GUI toolkit gives you the same thing, while retaining the ability to do things like, say, display an *image* or a *line chart*.
A good cross-platform GUI toolkit can even output a TUI if you need that to access your app's UI over SSH.
Like, say, Toga: https://toga.beeware.org

2026-06-04 08:59:26 UTC

RE: https://oldbytes.space/@feoh/116687129039392818
Advice I was given in my youth:
Print your slide on a full piece of paper. Put the paper on the ground. Stand on a chair.
If you can’t easily read your slide, neither can the person at the back of the room.
It flummoxes me that 30 years into using computers to show slides, tiny fonts in slide is *still* widespread practice.
#note1wzn…daha

2026-05-13 21:57:08 UTC

TIL on macOS, you can configure sudo to use Touch ID for authentication. Thanks to @npub17uu…yhdp for the tip. Details here: https://sixcolors.com/post/2020/11/quick-tip-enable-touch-id-for-sudo/

2026-04-22 00:41:14 UTC

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Oh yes. Went to mine a few years ago with a shoulder issue. Told me to take my shirt off, walked around me once, lifted my sore arm to a couple of angles, and declared "So you're right handed, use a mouse with that hand, your desk is a little higher than it should be, and your chair has armrests”. And he was dead on. Problem was resolved with a couple of weeks of exercises and some ergo fixes to my desk setup.

2026-03-26 23:06:18 UTC

Brains trust: for Reasons, my wife occasionally needs to wear a sports jersey as part of her work at a primary school ("wear your favourite team's jersey instead of school uniform if you donate to a fund raising effort" activities).
Neither of us are really sports people, but we *are* readers, so she has historically worn the jersey of a ... notable fictional magical broomstick-based sports team. But she would like to avoid supporting that particular franchise.
Any suggestions for a. Current front runner is a "Brakebills University Welters Team” jumper (from The Magicians) - but (a) it's not likely to be licensed content, and (b)... she teaches primary school, and might have to explain it 😆
Suggestions for a fictional sports team from she could support? Bonus points if it's YA *and* has official merch.

2026-01-21 07:26:15 UTC

The fact that "it works and I don't have to spend my life updating and maintaining" could be considered “a little weird” is a pretty big indictment on the tech industry.
https://social.jvns.ca/@b0rk/115927917544729408

2026-01-07 12:29:21 UTC

On this day, 20 years ago, I received a short email that radically changed the direction of my life. I can't thank @npub1k3l…3e8u and @npub1w0t…umh8 enough for starting me on this journey.
https://cecinestpasun.com/entries/the-passage-of-time/

2026-01-07 01:42:36 UTC

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Hadn't thought of that analog... it's interesting that the semantics (as currently described in the PEP, anyway) would be slightly different regarding the behavior directly after the opening quote.

2026-01-07 01:18:35 UTC

Python 3.14 brought us t-strings... will Python 3.15 add d-strings? While I'm wary of having so many prefixes (anyone want a `rtfd`string?), I can see myself using these a *lot*. https://pep-previews--4768.org.readthedocs.build/pep-0822/

2025-11-28 11:07:53 UTC

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OMG… torn between “How did you not know??!?!” and “Welcome to custard country”. The custard making powers of the ‘Mix is perhaps its greatest power.

2025-10-27 23:15:14 UTC

You judge a community on how it makes the hard decisions, not the easy ones - and with $1.5M on the line, this was a hard call to make.
I *strongly* endorse the principled position that the PSF has taken on this.
https://fosstodon.org/@ThePSF/115446659188615376

2025-08-21 00:37:00 UTC

Are you an Engineering Manager? Want to come work on OSS at Anaconda? We've got an open position to manage the OSS group at Anaconda that is responsible for maintaining BeeWare, PyScript, plus contributions to other projects like Jupyter. Position is US Remote. If you want additional details, get in touch! https://ats.rippling.com/anaconda/jobs/e3902219-3b93-4d73-959e-cf1bfe72025a?referral_id=cd9fc9a4-cac6-4d7a-a764-8f01447fcd60

2025-08-19 08:38:45 UTC

A question for macOS/iOS experts.
I have an iOS Xcode project. The project has an XCUnit test suite. That test suite generates logs. If I run the test suite through Xcode, I see the logs as they are generated.
However, I want to run the test suite through xcodebuild. If I do this, the log output *is* captured - but it's all dumped into an xcresults file, and isn't visible until *after* the test suite is complete.
Is there any way to *live stream* iOS log output from xcodebuild?

2025-07-17 08:36:26 UTC

OH: “two senior engineers and a manager debugging Python”, Oil on PowerPoint, 2025. #europython
https://files.cloudisland.nz/media_attachments/files/114/867/659/118/071/047/original/434b329c930e97cc.jpeg

2025-07-09 04:40:45 UTC

Is anyone aware of a reason why Github Actions has, over the last week or so, become completely flaky when trying to connect to *any* of Fedora’s package mirrors? Something that used to be completely reliable is now failing maybe 50% of the time for me…

2025-05-16 21:25:00 UTC

According to @npub1vv8…6fhk, Tasmania apparently got drunk and woke up in the Tasman sea. #pyconus
https://files.cloudisland.nz/media_attachments/files/114/519/617/740/621/706/original/5c77b90f1510e961.jpeg

2025-05-08 10:05:39 UTC

If anyone knows how to get the attention of someone at Apple who won’t respond to an App Review request with a platitude that ignores the evidence right in front of them, I’d appreciate the connect.
Sincerely, the CPython iOS platform maintainer…

2025-01-23 11:03:21 UTC

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A daily workpad. It’s something I was taught to do when I was a Physics undergrad - essentially a diary of all your lab results. Programming makes it a bit easier - you don’t need long form notes, you can reference the GitHub ticket.
I do it with Obsidian, but any text editor will do; a folder per year, fresh page each week, a section a day, bullet point for each thing that was done.

2025-01-11 06:09:47 UTC

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I’ve seen the buzz... haven't played with it though. However, trying to poke around on the site right now, I can't say their page load times are that much more impressive.
The bigger issue for me will be CI and Pages. My CI needs are... unconventional :-) As bad as it is, Github Actions at least supports Linux and Windows, plus macOS on both x86 and arm64, with Windows ARM64 coming to the free tier this month (so they say…).

2025-01-11 05:24:20 UTC

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PLEASE - if you're doing a big UI rewrite, hire an engineer somewhere geographically remote (or add simulation for those conditions into your testing set).
If you aren't developing for and testing for situations where round trip network latency is measured in *seconds*, you're not testing your app.
I have a 100Mbit connection. But US-East-1 is 13000km away from me *as the crow flies*. Physics imposes a *best case* round trip time of 0.08s. And multiple server hops *isn't* best case.

2025-01-11 05:19:17 UTC

Github has clearly just rolled out a bunch of new UI rework - and it's very clear that they've been developed and tested by engineers that have a multi-gigabit network connection to the server in the building next door.
Know how I can tell? Almost every UI interaction that involves a page change now involves clicking a button, then a multi-second wait until *something* loads in the background… but with no UI feedback that anything is happening at all.

2025-01-08 22:07:20 UTC

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Congrats on the new gig!
I'm sure you've got plenty on your plate with the new position, but if you ever want to talk about PyCharm and BeeWare, I'm game. Supporting PyCharm users is one of the biggest challenges I've got, because I don't use PyCharm myself, and there's evidently enough confusion that many PyCharm users can’t work out the details themselves.

2025-01-08 06:55:26 UTC

One of the most frustrating things about Open Source is that there's almost no way to know if someone is happily using the tools you build. I found out today that someone I know has been using Briefcase for an internal company tool... but I had no idea because there's no need for them to report or register their usage. The only reason I found out is because of weird edge case that caused a bug.

2024-12-26 11:24:29 UTC

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… whenever Santa bought it? :-P His elves tell me Nov 26; but from LEGO Australia, so it might have been from an earlier manufacturing run? I have seen the paper bags in other kits.

2024-12-26 10:37:01 UTC

It’s Boxing Day, which means it’s time to open the most important of boxes: the LEGO box. #Xmas #LEGO
https://files.cloudisland.nz/media_attachments/files/113/718/683/010/837/169/original/15c3f3d467f8a686.jpeg
https://files.cloudisland.nz/media_attachments/files/113/718/683/464/463/626/original/664e827c07992f2d.jpeg
https://files.cloudisland.nz/media_attachments/files/113/718/683/940/161/684/original/43acea837112ca31.jpeg
https://files.cloudisland.nz/media_attachments/files/113/718/684/385/993/304/original/dd52f32dab0c945b.jpeg

2024-12-08 02:46:38 UTC

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Honestly? Quite possibly yes. The highly unscientific anecdotal evidence from PyCon AU (just finished, same full masking requirement) is that there is a *significant* number of people not attending because of masking, especially on the “fringes” of the community - people who are attending at suggestion of employer etc. And, that then has a direct impact of revenue, and indirectly the ability to close sponsorship.

2024-11-29 02:05:40 UTC

Oh my... Django#373 is being resolved?! /me checks the weather report in hell, and for any strange porcine reports from airport traffic control…
Nice work, Csirmaz Bendegúz!
This means there's only 1 remaining 3-digit issue in Django's tracker (#897, for a bi-directional admin interface for m2m fields)
https://mastodon.scot/@flup/113560132365857932

2024-11-20 00:40:47 UTC

Currently working on a PR to Toga* that has been contributed by a developer who is completely blind. The insights that are coming from this are fascinating.
For example - 80 character line limits apparently aren't a thing in the "blind coding" world.
And discussing how tools like "Visual Studio" work... well…
(* Yes - a completely blind programmer is contributing to a GUI framework. Accessibility matters.)

2024-11-16 21:13:55 UTC

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The two major features I’ve seen mentioned: onboarding experience, and moderation. When you start a bluesky account, you’re given a “starter pack” of users to follow based on interests; and the moderations tools are apparently more effective at squashing certain types of abuse. These are both areas where Mastodon has *not* got a good story.

2024-11-16 21:10:04 UTC

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I’m not on Bluesky; but if you’re starting a discussion about why people use it and starting with “licenses and standards” as the important discussion topic, you’re 100% missing the point of why people use it. They’re using BSky *because the product works better for them*. They *do not care* that it runs on X protocol or uses Y license. Like most FLOSS, the politics of a product choice comes a distant second to “does it work for my use case?”.

2024-10-22 01:15:42 UTC

Carl Sagan once famously said that if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, first you must invent the universe.
I am currently working on modifying the various toolchains that are needed to build Python binary packages for iOS.
I am currently feeling Sagan's sentiment *HARD*.

2024-10-08 00:11:45 UTC

Today marks a personal milestone. After 10 years of wrangling iOS and Android support for CPython, there is an official final CPython release - 3.13.0 - that officially supports iOS and Android out of the box.
https://docs.python.org/3.13/whatsnew/3.13.html#support-for-mobile-platforms
It's worth noting that today wouldn't have happened without a substantial grant from @npub1vv8…6fhk in 2020, and almost 3 years of 2xFTE funding from my employer, Anaconda. Turns out: funding open source gets results.

2024-09-27 16:25:04 UTC

If there's anyone in my circles looking for a new engineering manager position, and would like to join the Anaconda OSS team, get in touch - Anaconda is looking to expand the manager pool. It's remote friendly, but the people being managed are mostly US based (some EU, and yours truly in AU).

2024-09-15 23:49:43 UTC

I know there's plenty of plane nerds in my circles... and I know there's plenty of people always looking for new talk ideas... it strikes me that there’s a lot of potential for a “programming analogy” talk based off this. The video being referenced (linked the thread) is a fascinating set of insights, and the observation in this toot is just one of many possible interpretations of those insights.
https://hachyderm.io/@danderson/113142792603203381

2024-09-08 00:11:25 UTC

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Oooh - thank you - this may solve a bunch of problems Briefcase has…

2024-09-07 06:57:33 UTC

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If that *is* the play, then it’s a master stroke of getting VC money to do what *we* need, not what *they* want. I just find it hard to believe that “we’ll be a loss leader so your other investments succeed” is an actual investment pitch. Or, they’re pitching a services business, which traditionally VC’s get bored with because they can’t 1000x.

2024-09-07 02:23:19 UTC

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Oh - absolutely this. As enthusiastic as I am about the direction uv is going, I *haven't* adopted them anywhere - because I want very much to understand Astral’s intended business model before I hook my wagon to their tools. It's definitely not clear to me how they're going to stay liquid once the VC money runs out. They could get me onboard in a hot second if they published a "This is what we're planning to charge for" blog post.

2024-09-07 01:06:35 UTC

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… no? Astral is hardly the *second* mover here - cf pipenv, poetry, pdm, etc etc. But, they’re the first one that has been *funded*, which means it’s not “2 folks fixing bugs on weekends”, it’s “a whole team writing code full time with a purpose”. That makes a *big* difference to the rate of progress. *That* is the point.
You can question whether the money poses a strategic risk if/when it goes away; but you can’t argue the money yields *progress*.

2024-09-06 23:50:34 UTC

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I don’t think the magic is that magic… the magic is money. If you spend money, you can hire people, and *shit* *gets* *done*. Astral’s proving that with packaging; I’ve spent the last week working full time on getting iOS cross compiles working. That’s time that I don’t have unless someone’s (Anaconda, in my case) is paying me to do it.

2024-09-06 23:42:59 UTC

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… you mean RustPython? https://github.com/RustPython/RustPython It’s been around for years; but it’s quite a bit slower than CPython.

2024-09-05 20:09:23 UTC

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I mean… I’m not saying I *wouldn’t* join… but I need some more details. International shipping is my major concern :-)

2024-08-30 02:21:36 UTC

Is there anyone in my Mastodon-orbit who knows enough about Flatpak to be able to answer some questions? Not just simple usage questions - these are higher level "so what *is* the right way to do this weird thing" type questions.

2024-08-14 00:11:24 UTC

This. We have to field a disturbing number of support queries for BeeWare that amount to “I haven't done your tutorial or read your docs, and ChatGPT has hallucinated some options that don't exist".
The only difference is that we usually don't get the "sorry" part at the end. I’ve seriously contemplated putting up a "Days since ChatGPT made work for us" sign. I doubt we'd need more than one digit.
https://aus.social/@Joshsharp/112646263257692603