Weeknotes 2022/9 - WebRTC, Wordress, Pip

I’ve been interested in WebRTC for a long time but never really had the time to study it properly. This week I finally started a project where I get to dive deep into it. The first steps were quite daunting but sourcs like WebRTC For The Curious helped a lot.

The first steps only got me to get a pair of video elements working between two computers, hoping to get a bit farther in upcoming weeks.

Back To WordPress

My English-speaking Hoyci-blog (that got its weird name from the Sneakers film as an anagram of “Setec Astronomy”) has been dormat for months now because after moving to a new computer, I couldn’t get the JavaScript dependencies installed for the dev env (even though there was a lockfile). This is by far the most annoying thing in JavaScript/Node projects; even small projects have thousands or tens of thousands of dependencies and chances of one or more failing to install after a couple of months is pretty big. If you don’t have good tests and a bot automatically upgrading dependencies at least weekly, you’re going to have a rough time coming back to an old project.

I’ve been pretty happy with Hugo that is powering this TIL site but for a proper blog I want to have comments enabled and static generators are not very good with that. So after a long journey from WordPRess to Django to JavaScript, the site is now back to WordPress and I’m able to publish on it again!

Force Pip to Respect Virtualenv

I’m always eager to improve my tooling and this week Jeff tweeted about a nice solution for stopping accidentally installing pip packages into the global scope instead of a virtualenv by setting the following ENV variable:

export PIP_REQUIRE_VIRTUALENV="true"

Apparently there’s a less brute force way as well by adding following to ~/.config/pip/pip.conf:

[install]
require-virtualenv = true

[uninstall]
require-virtualenv = true

I’m happy with the first solution at the moment, though.