Blog¶

Towards closing the gap between declaring and verifying Python dependencies

This is a repost of my original article in Siemens' blog with some formatting enhancements.

Choosing dependency declarations by the environment they constrain and pairing each with the evidence that supports it makes the support claims of Python projects deliberate and substantiated.

Python projects in the wild declare their dependencies in widely varied ways, from requirements without version specifiers through lower bounds and lower and upper bounds to pins. The variation invites two questions that often go unanswered: how were these declarations chosen, and how are they verified?

Closing the loop on project scaffolding with Copier

This is a repost of my original article in Siemens' blog with some formatting enhancements.

Standards that ship, foundations that evolve: Copier distributes engineering and organizational standards through versioned templates and reconciles shared improvements with project-specific changes.

Starting a software project requires establishing a project foundation for its development and evolution. To establish this foundation, teams must decide how the project will be structured, developed, validated, maintained, and delivered. These decisions affect the project throughout its lifecycle and often draw on experience accumulated across earlier projects.

LLM Engineering on GitLab with CI Services

This is a repost of my original article in Siemens' blog with some formatting enhancements.

GitLab CI services with GPU acceleration enable seamless integration of LLMs into DevOps pipelines without requiring additional infrastructure.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated notable capabilities on a range of natural language tasks, facilitating advanced AI applications with natural language interfaces. Developers typically use pre-trained proprietary or open-access¹ LLMs rather than building them from scratch due to the significant resources, data, and expertise required to develop and train these complex models. Common techniques for developing LLM-infused applications include static prompt engineering to guide LLM responses for desired outcomes with crafted instructions.

A secure and scalable Renovate service on GitLab

This is a repost of my original article in Siemens' blog with some formatting enhancements.

Self-hosting a per-project Renovate service on GitLab with a project access token and CI approval gate enables secure and scalable dependency updates even with non-public dependencies.

Abstraction plays a crucial role in software engineering, enabling developers to manage complexity, hide implementation details, and create modular, reusable components. As Grady Booch said:

The entire history of software engineering is one of rising levels of abstraction.

— Grady Booch

These abstractions extend to integrating external functionality from software libraries or modules, especially from open-source and inner-source software ecosystems. Managing such dependencies manually incurs significant effort and requires discipline, contributing to technical debt when neglected by causing outdated dependencies and thereby lack of new features and optimizations, compatibility issues, security vulnerabilities, and reduced maintainability. (Semi-)automated dependency updating solutions facilitate the update process by discovering new versions of dependencies and generating merge requests (MRs) for updates.

Visual review of MkDocs sites in GitLab MRs

This is a repost of my original article in Siemens' blog with some formatting enhancements.

Leveraging GitLab CI job artifacts and GitLab review apps enables easy visual review of MkDocs sites in merge requests with a great developer experience and no extra infrastructure.

Advanced editorial workflows involving collaborative writing, content review, and approval are first-class citizens to Docs as Code (DaC), which is the philosophy of creating documentation – and more generally, static websites – by using the same tools and workflows that are commonly used to develop code. Instead of requiring specialized content management systems, DaC uses plain-text markup, a VCS and a DevOps platform. This enables review through merge requests (MRs), and validation and deployment to a static site hosting service through CI/CD.