Michael McClimon

Posts in Python

Goofy Program Files: fold-headers

August 2, 2023

My friend Chasen sent me a message tonight that he would also like to see more of the goofy program files, and who am I to say no? Today’s entry comes via my last job, where I spent an awful lot of time looking at email. You probably know what email is, but maybe you don’t know what it actually looks like underneath.1 The part of the emails you actually read are the content; email also has a large set of headers that contain metadata about the message and its path to you; they’re very similar to HTTP headers.

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Goofy Program Files: jlink

July 14, 2023

After my last (aka, the inaugural) goofy program entry, I was overwhelmed with feedback1 that people wanted more, and who am I to deny them? Today’s entry is a program I call jlink (for “Jira link”).2 We use Jira at work for task tracking, and the ticket identifiers (like “ABC-1234”) wind up littering everything we do. One day at work I was writing a document that had a long listing of Jira tickets, and I wanted to add links to them.

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I've been writing a bunch of Python lately

June 24, 2023

In February, I left Fastmail to join the team at MongoDB.1 Among other things, this means that after nearly six years, I’m no longer paid to write Perl. This is bittersweet: Perl was the first programming language I ever loved; it’s responsible for my leap from academia and accompanying move to Philadelphia, and indirectly responsible for some dear friendships. As a language, though, I think it has no future, and as such I’ve been trying to write my own little programs in other languages.

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