How to spin up a local SMTP server for testing purposes.

First thoughts on using node2nix to mange a development environment which contains a mix of Python and Node dependencies. In this step I describe my use case and the first impressions of node2nix.

The package collection nixpkgs has a nice way to configure and tweak the package set based on the configuration file ~/.nixpkgs/config.nix.

Changing something in pythonPackages was not so obvious to me though. In my case I used dulwich on Darwin. It was pulled in as a dependency of …

Around forms and APIs the problem of validating input data and serializing application data into simple data structures occurs on a regular base to me. marshmallow is a Python library which aims to solve this problem and appears to be pretty flexible.

I have evaluated it recently as a candidate …

Sometimes I want to install a Python dependency into my working environment just to try out something quickly, and decide afterwards if I want to keep it or not. This is a case where a good old run of pip install would do just fine.

Overview and insights into how development environments for Python can be reliably managed based on the Nix package manager.

Another piece in my technology puzzle to set up a simple blog based on a static site generator is Nix - The Purely Functional Package Manager.

Hello Restructured Text!

"Hello World!" from a Markdown file.

Make it work

Getting this to work, I realized the following bits are needed:

The package markdown

This has to be installed into the Python environment. Thanks to my Nix based environment this is just a tiny tweak:

diff --git a/default.nix b …

A small snippet to get the version if the nixpkgs which are currently used. Useful when tracking down trouble and trying to reproduce things with the correct commit.