This is a quick review of Bear Writer, a popular note-taking application that I tried out a few weeks ago. A much larger and more detailed post about my overall quest for a note-taking solution (I have very picky, perhaps contradictory requirements) is forthcoming! The good Bear is a beautiful set of applications. Attractive without being ostentatious or getting in the way, pretty quick/slick to use, desktop and mobile apps clearly resemble each other, etc.

It took (much) longer than anticipated, for a number of reasons, and like any good .0 release it’ll take a few minor releases to really get up to speed – but it’s here! Fabric 2.0.0 is now out on PyPI, along with the project that does much of the heavy lifting, Invoke 1.0.0.

Please see the upgrade documentation for the gory details, and if you like, read on for some non-instructive reflection on the occasion.

It’s been brought to my attention that I screwed up the RSS/Atom feed for this site during last year’s redesign - in a couple of ways! Thus, most feed readers haven’t picked up on new posts.

Opening remarks

This has been a hard blog post to write; not in a technical sense (though blogging always is - it’s why I don’t do more of it!) but simply because Fabric 2 has been “coming soon” for what feels like ages, and putting it out in the open turns out to involve a lot of emotions.

But here we are: Fabric 2 is no longer private!

Along with some general site maintenance in preparation for another big announcement (!), I wanted to note that I’ve started a ‘reviews’ section of the site’s static content. Mostly to port over something that had lived in my private vimwiki and that I’d been exporting as a Github gist; content living in a gist always feels dirty to me, especially when I have an ostensibly easy to use website…

Being picky As mentioned in my 2015 round-up post, I’ve been trying to make ends meet, re: open source plus a paying job. In March, I parted ways with a bunch of great people to take time off1 and embark on a job hunt. My goal was to find a company that could dedicate time to upstream maintenance, used my projects heavily in production, or both: Without a clear split between “internal” and “external” development time, prioritization becomes a tug of war leaving both sides unhappy.

The next round of Paramiko releases is now out on PyPI, including – as previewed here – 2.0!

For some time now, plans to switch Paramiko’s crypto backend from PyCrypto to PyCA’s Cryptography have been in motion. (Sometimes, slow-motion. Sorry.) These efforts are drawing to a close, and because they represent a nontrivial change in install dependencies – even though there aren’t any public API changes – we’re going to call the result Paramiko 2.0.

As touched on in a recent post about redoing this site, I recently had the (mis)fortune of using a Golang project in anger for the first time. It’s not exactly a reasoned critique drawn from years of experience, but I wanted to share some of my gripes regardless. As a long-time Python-using dev & sysadmin, I found the following things frustrating when attempting to use, troubleshoot, understand and/or modify a Golang project (specifically Hugo, but most would apply to anything in the ecosystem): Adding a build step to the development process: even a fast build step feels like pulling teeth when one’s used to a simple edit-save-run cycle; and Hugo currently takes about 5-10 seconds (!) to build on my no-slouch workstation, even with all its dependencies cached.

I’ve rebuilt my website! This post isn’t likely to be interesting unless you’re into static site generators or navel-gazing. It’s also not too long, as I’m omitting almost all the gory details.