I'll get to legacy software. First, however, some backstory on observability.

Sailors will sometimes create "Float Plans". Like aircraft flight plans, they have an itinerary to make it slightly easier to find us when something goes wrong. Unlike airspace, which is tightly controlled by the FAA, the seas are more-or-less …

This is a problem folks new to Python have, and sometimes can't articulate that they have it.

They don't know which package is the "right" one to use. Tox vs. Nox. Click vs. Argparse vs. getopts? What's the "best" choice?

• Response 1. The whole Python ecosystem is chaos and the …

See http://books.apple.com/us/book/id1586977675

The Python Programming language is a deep topic. This book provides focused guidance on installing Python, creating virtual enivironments and using Jupyter Lab to build foundational skills in using Python. The book covers many built-in data types. There are two small case …

Check out this list of questions on Stack Overflow:

http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=%5Bpython%5D+whitespace+syntax

About 10% of these are really just complaints about Python's syntax. Almost every Stack Overflow question on Python's use of syntactic whitespace is really just a complaint.

Here's today's example: "Python without …

See the previous sections, starting with the first on finding an ancient CGI script.

We don't need an OpenAPI specification. But, it is so helpful to formalize the behavior of a web site that it's hard for me to imagine working without it.

In this case, the legacy script only …

Be sure to see the original script and the test cases in the prior posts.

We need to understand a little about what a web request is. This can help us do the refactoring.

It can help to think of a web server a function that maps a request to …

See "We have an ancient Python2 CGI script -- what do we do?" The previous post in this series provides an overview of the process of getting rid of legacy code.

Here's some code. I know it's painfully long; the point is to provide a super-specific, very concrete example of what …

This was a shocking email: the people have a Python 2 CGI script. They needed advice on Python 2 to 3 migration.

Here's my advice on a Python 2 CGI script: Throw It Away.

A great deal of the CGI processing is part of the wsgi module, as well as …

I need to rewrite Stingray Reader. This project handles a certain amount of file processing using a schema to assure the Logical Layout is understood. It handles several common Physical Formats:

• CSV files where the format is extended by the various dialects options.
• COBOL files in ASCII or EBCDIC.

The …

I don't get many of these "I have code that doesn't work" requests. But I do see them once in a great while.

It might be something like the following two-part explanation with a following question.

I have this code

from base64 import b64encode
def some_func(message):
    msg = b64encode(message …