As part of your code, you may be inclined to call a command to do something. But is it always a good idea? How to do it safely? What happens behind the scenes?

Gynvael Coldwind jest badaczem bezpieczeństwa pracującym w Google, który organizuje cotygodniowe livestreamy na tematy bezpieczeństwa i programowania po polsku i po angielsku). Częścią streamów są misje — w skrócie, zadania w stylu CTF-owym dotyczące inżynierii wstecznej. Wczorajsza misja była o elfickim — znaczy o Paint’cie — znaczy o programowaniu w Pythonie i jego bajtkodzie.

Setting up Python is usually simple, but there are some places where newcomers (and experienced users) need to be careful. What versions are there? What’s the difference between Python, CPython, Anaconda, PyPy? Those and many other questions may stump new developers, or people wanting to use Python.

A short time ago, the macOS display menu stopped working for me. It no longer had options to change mirroring settings, only supporting AirPlay. So I wrote my own, also solving some other issues.

You might get unusual errors about Unicode and inability to convert to ASCII. Programs might just crash at random. Those are often simple to fix — all you need is correct locale configuration.

To create a project that other people can use and contribute to, you need to follow a specific directory structure. Moreover, releasing a new version should be as simple and painless as possible. For my projects, I use a template that has the structure already in place, and comes with automation for almost every part of a release.

CSV is not a standard. What does that really mean for anyone using that format? The file’s recipient may be unable to read it the way you intended. Separators, decimal marks, escaping and encodings are all problems — and Excel does them all pretty badly.