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Date and time management libraries in many programming languages are famously bad. Python's datetime module comes to mind as one of the best (worst?) examples, and so does JavaScript's Date class . It feels like these libraries could not have been made worse on purpose, or so I thought until today, when I needed to implement some date calculations in a backup rotation script written in bash. So, if you wanted to learn how to perform date and time arithmetic in your bash scripts, you've come to t...

In this article I want to share a technique that I recently learned to display an interactive map on a website. For this, you will need just a few lines of HTML and JavaScript. This solution does not require you to sign up for any accounts or services anywhere, it is completely free and open source, and can be integrated with any front or back end web framework. Give the demo below a try and if you like it, then keep on reading to learn how you can add a map like this one to your website in just...

Like I did last year , I reserved some time during my holiday break to prepare an independent report of the Flask ecosystem in 2025.

A couple of months ago, I received a request from a random Internet user to add CSRF protection to my little web framework Microdot , and I thought it was a fantastic idea. When I set off to do this work in early November I expected I was going to have to deal with anti-CSRF tokens, double-submit cookies and hidden form fields, pretty much the traditional elements that we have used to build a defense against CSRF for years. And I did start along this tedious route. But then I bumped into a new w...

You may have seen the recent reports of a malware that stole API keys, tokens and other secrets from a large number of developers. From where were these secrets stolen from? You guessed it, they were mostly stolen from environment variables. We use environment variables to configure information that processes need to run, but this type of storage was not designed for security, so using the environment for secrets always comes with risk. Given how serious this recent attack was, I thought it woul...

In November of 2024 I wrote a blog post titled "Is Python Really That Slow?" , in which I tested several versions of Python and noted the steady progress the language has been making in terms of performance. Today is the 8th of October 2025, just a day after the official release of Python 3.14. Let's rerun the benchmarks to find out how fast the new version of Python is!

In the Q&A session following my EuroPython 2025 presentation about the Microdot web framework, a member of the audience asked me what the performance of MicroPython running on a microcontroller is. This took me a bit by surprise, because I really had no way to quantify it, I just knew it was, in vague terms, not great. I never questioned the low performance, because it was never a problem for me. My answer to the question was that microcontrollers cannot replace a computer, and that these de...

People keep asking me If I use Generative AI tools for coding and what I think of them, so this is my effort to put my thoughts in writing, so that I can send people here instead of having to repeat myself every time I get the question. From the title you already know that this isn't a pro-AI blog post. But it isn't an anti-AI post either, at least I don't think it is. There are already plenty of articles by AI promoters and AI critics, so I don't feel there is a need for me to write one more of...

My article on creating a React + Flask project is one of the most visited on this blog. Can you believe that I wrote it over 5 years ago? In this article and video I'm going to share how I'm building this type of project in 2025. The main change I've introduced since I documented my 2020 process is that now I'm using Vite (French word that is pronounced "veet" and means "quick") instead of create-react-app to scaffold the React application, since the latter isn't maintained anymore.

The other day I shared my code editor window during a video call with a client, and he immediately did a double take. "How did you make your code look like that?", he wanted to know. Have a look at the following screenshot and see if like my client, anything calls your attention: If you are wondering what secret keyboard trick allows you to type ≠ , ≤ , ≥ and other unusual characters, and then how to get Python and other programming languages to accept them then read on, as this is much easier t...

I've been given a review copy of The Quick Python Book, Fourth Edition by Naomi Ceder, published by Manning. Since I often get asked for Python book recommendations, I thought it would be a good idea to share a review, in case you are looking for material to sharpen your Python skills.