I have no need for dynamic content, and so much prefer the simplicity of having a static website. With a static site generator you can get some of the benefits of dynamic apps (automatically updated menus, avoiding duplication in markup) with much higher security and lower maintenance.
Python has a module called doctest in it’s standard library that will search for usage examples in your documentation and check that they work as shown. This means you can copy and paste snippets from the interactive shell, and ensure that they’re kept up to date.
I stumbled across this blog post by Chris Beams, it has a very clear explanation of the way git expects commit messages to be formatted. Being able to place explanatory paragraphs, links, pasted error output etc really improves the history of my repos. It was always a struggle with CVS and SVN choosing between an extremely long commit message or losing context. The tools are able to distinguish the title from the description too and so can choose how and where to display them as appropriate.
Let’s Encrypt is a free certificate authority run as a non-profit organisation. I decided to try setting it up on my server, and was finished within five minutes. The certbot tool has been packaged for Debian and has been backported for Jessie. A single command configured Apache to redirect to https always, create the SSL cert, install it and create a systemd timer file to automatically renew it:
Debian is my Linux distro of choice. I first started using it sometime around 2003, but switched to Ubuntu for several years because I became frustrated with the age of the packages in it’s repository. Going back to Debian has made me appreciate it much more than I did before, several years of fixed versions with security updates means that I can write software and mostly forget about it until the next release.
The Decimal class in the standard library is the way to avoid double precision errors in Python.