Making "pip" Faster

We use pip to install packages at work. Mostly in combination with virtualenv and wheel packages. Lately I had to re-install again and again a bunch of virtual environments and looks for a way to speed things up.

The solution was to cache the pip downloads and also to keep in a local directory the bigger .whl packages. All done in ~/.pip/pip.conf. Most of the downloads are done once now and using local .whl means no more compilation (I'm looking at you PyYAML ...). I didn't measure the time difference, but for sure it feels faster.

A Simple Python Based Configuration with Overrides

Here's a simple Python based configuration system that supports overrides. We use a variant of it at work and it proves to be very handy. The fact that you can use all of Python in your configuration is very powerful. We use Puppet to write config_local.py in production/qa environments and keep the default good for development machines.

Import Google Bookmarks to Pinboard

I decided to give Pinboard a try. Sadly they lack support for importing Google Bookmarks.

I wrote a little utility to do just that (still waiting for pinboard support to get back to me ;)

Python Logging Overview

Gave a talk at work about Python Logging.

You can view it here.