menno.io

I had a need to deploy a small VPS recently and I wanted it to be reliable and secure so I gave FreeBSD a try.

I owe much of my career to Python and I used to choose Python for everything ... but now I don't.

It used to be that if you went down the standalone window manager/compositor path on Linux (i3, awesome, sway etc) you'd have to cobble together a panel, screen locking, notifications etc using a bunch of disparate tools.

Your contacts data is valuable.

I presented a short talk tonight at the Christchurch Python meetup about the Python standard library's excellent pathlib module and why you should use it.

I presented recently at the Christchurch Python meetup about a variety of tools, techniques and tricks I use to be productive as a software developer.

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to present at the April 2025 Christchurch Python meetup.

Do you like Python?

It's been a month of meetup talks for me.

Two out of three talks this month done!

I gave a presentation today at the Christchurch Rust meetup that introduced the widely used Axum web framework.

Some time ago, I was looking for an idea for a small Rust project to help me get some practical experience with WebAssembly (wasm).

I've recently become quite enamoured with Logseq.

I gave a talk tonight at the Christchurch Python meetup titled "Security For Python Developers".

I have an Intel NUC that I've been using for monitoring and backups on my home network.

IMAPClient 3.0.0 is out!

I gave a presentation today for the Christchurch Python meetup that talks about why pytest is so such a fantastic testing framework and how to approach common testing tasks and problems with it.

I gave a talk this week for the Christchurch Python meetup that went into how iteration works in Python in some detail.

Mike Kittridge and I ran a talk last week for the Christchurch Python meetup that covered a large assortment of ways that Python programs can store data and exchange data with other programs.

The release notes for Go 1.17 mention an interesting change in the Go compiler: function arguments and return values will now be passed using registers instead of the stack.

I gave an online (COVID lockdown) presentation to the Christchurch Python Meetup tonight that covered a host of new features that were added to Python in versions 3.8 and 3.9.

IMAPClient 2.2.0 is out!

use-package is an Emacs package which allows packages to be loaded declaratively.

After a recent Christchurch Python meetup, I was asked to create a list of Python libraries and tools that I tend to gravitate towards when working on Python projects.

I had the pleasure of giving a talk about Python virtual environments at this week's Christchurch Python meetup.

I've just published a Jupyter Notebook I used to present an introduction to the excellent Python attrs package at the November 2018 Christchurch Python meetup.

influx-spout 2.1 has just been released and it includes a bunch of exciting new features.

IMAPClient 2.1.0 has just been released!

As well as my main gig, I do some work with the excellent folks at Jump Trading.

I recently had to write some NodeJS code which uses the AWS SDK to list all the objects in a S3 bucket which potentially contains many objects (currently over 80,000 in production).

I recently gave a talk at the Christchurch Python meetup which discussed the strengths and weaknesses of shell scripts, and why you might want to consider using Python instead of shell scripts.

I'm very happy to announce that IMAPClient 2.0.0 is out.

IMAPClient 1.1.0 has just been released!

This week I had the pleasure of giving a talk to Data Science masters students at the University of Canterbury (NZ).

The Go compiler normally stops after it finds 10 errors, aborting with a too many errors message.

I gave a talk at last night's Christchurch Python meetup about Python's relatively new asynchronous programming features.

The code has been imported, tickets have migrated and the Bitbucket repository is now a redirect: the IMAPClient project is now using Git and Github.

IMAPClient 1.0.2 is out!

Those paying attention may have noticed that this site has changed.

The IMAPClient mailing list has been hosted at Librelist for a while.

IMAPClient 1.0.0 is finally here!

Following on from last week's post about the upcoming IMAPClient 1.0 release, I'd like to draw attention to some significant, compatibility breaking changes related to the handling of search criteria.

IMAPClient 1.0 is really close to being done now and it's going to be one of the biggest releases in its history (thanks largely to the support of the good people at Nylas).

I'm chuffed to announce that IMAPClient 0.13 is out!

I'm very happy to announce that IMAPClient 0.12 is out!

I gave a presentation introducting IMAPClient at the monthly Christchurch Python meetup on Thursday.

I've been wanting to do this for a while: IMAPClient is now completely hosted on Bitbucket.

I gave a talk last night at the monthly Christchurch Python meetup titled "Go For Pythonistas".

Now that they have officially launched I can happily announce that the good folks at Inbox are sponsoring the development of certain features and fixes for IMAPClient.

This is a somewhat belated announcement that IMAPClient 0.11 is out (and has been for a little over a week now).