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The state of CI platforms is much stronger than it was just a few years ago. Overall, this is a good thing: access to powerful CI platforms enables software developers and companies to ship more reliable software more frequently, which benefits its users/customers. Centralized CI platforms like GitHub Actions, GitLab Pipelines, and Bitbucket provide benefits of scale, as the Internet serves as a c

Mercurial 5.2 was released on November 5, 2019. It is the first version of Mercurial that supports Python 3. This milestone comes nearly 11 years after Python 3.0 was first released on December 3, 2008. Speaking as a maintainer of Mercurial and an avid user of Python, I feel like the experience of making Mercurial work with Python 3 is worth sharing because there are a number of lessons to be lear

Python application distribution is generally considered an unsolved problem. At their PyCon 2019 keynote talk, Russel Keith-Magee identified code distribution as a potential black swan - an existential threat for longevity - for Python. In their words, Python hasn't ever had a consistent story for how I give my code to someone else, especially if that someone else isn't a developer and just wants

Over the past several months, a handful of people had been complaining that Mercurial's test harness was executing much slower on Macs. But this slowdown seemingly wasn't occurring on Linux or Windows. And not every Mac user experienced the slowness! Before jetting off to the Mercurial 4.8 developer meetup in Stockholm a few weeks ago, I sat down with a relatively fresh 6+6 core MacBook Pro and ex

I think I first heard about the Zstandard compression algorithm at a Mercurial developer sprint in 2015. At one end of a large table a few people were uttering expletives out of sheer excitement. At developer gatherings, that's the universal signal for something is awesome. Long story short, a Facebook engineer shared a link to the RealTime Data Compression blog operated by Yann Collet (then known

Any time Facebook talks about technical matters I tend to listen. They have a track record of demonstrating engineering leadership in several spaces. And, unlike many companies that just talk, Facebook often gives others access to those ideas via source code and healthy open source projects. It's rare to see a company operating on the frontier of the computing field provide so much insight into th

Docker is a really nifty tool. It vastly lowers the barrier to distributing and executing applications. It forces people to think about building server side code as a collection of discrete applications and services. When it was released, I instantly realized its potential, including for uses it wasn't primary intended for, such as applications in automated build and test environments. Over the mo

My first experience with Mercurial (Firefox development) was very unpleasant. Coming from Git, I thought Mercurial was slow and perhaps even more awkward to use than Git. I frequently encountered repository corruption that required me to reclone. I thought the concept of a patch queue was silly compared to Git branches. It was all extremely frustrating and I dare say a hinderance to my productivit