Tag: software engineering

It’s Hard To Talk to Engineers: A Primer

It’s Hard To Talk to Engineers: A Primer

by rachelgeist ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

So it’s been a year working from home now which is something. It’s also Women’s History Month (for not much longer, but here we are). I’m going to talk about something that’s happened to me many a time in honor of March and working from home and all the female engineers I know.

Maybe you know an engineer. This engineer doesn’t necessarily have to be a software engineer, but mechanical, chemical, aeronautical, you name it. Have you ever asked that engineer what she’s been doing at work, how work’s been going, or something to that effect? Or perhaps this engineer has brought up work in a conversation. Maybe you’re just being introduced to this engineer and you’re finding out what she does for a living. The conversation might go like this,

“How’s work been going?”

“Pretty good. I’ve been working on [insert project here].”

“Oh wow, that sounds complicated. Haha you’re smart.”

“. . .thanks? . . .”

Conversation moves to something else.

Another situation you might run across is a very excited engineer wanting to show you a project she’s been working realllllly hard on for a long time.

“Want to see my project I just finished up??”

“Sure.”

“Look! It’s [insert project]!

“Cool!”

“. . .thanks. . .”

Conversation ends.

I get it. It’s hard to come up with conversation for topics you may not be super familiar with. It isn’t just for engineers (I’m guilty of this in conversation too), but this is my wheelhouse and I’m using it as an example.

Now, what might one say instead of the token “cool” responses? I’ve been thinking about this for quite a while and here’s a few to get you started:

  • What’s been the most challenging part of this project?
  • What problem were you trying to solve?
  • How does X work?
  • Which part are you most proud about figuring out how to solve?
  • Did you have to work with teammates on this project? How were they?
  • What would you improve if you had to do it over again?
  • Are there any new concepts/technologies you used?
  • What was the most fun/challenging thing to learn about?

My intention is not to make anyone feel bad, because I know not everyone wants to hear a ton about work stuff all the time. I also know that it’s really hard to have an in-depth conversation with someone about technical information you’re unfamiliar with. (So, how’s all that tension in the metals and bending going, mechanical engineers?) I just hope that it encourages you to ask a follow up question or two the next time you stumble into one of these conversations. You’ll make an engineer feel seen and happy.

More next time!

-Rachel

Musings on Versioning and Poetry

Musings on Versioning and Poetry

by rachelgeist ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Well, it’s almost the end of February, so I thought I’d say hi. There really hasn’t been much that has piqued my interest in the coding realm recently to want to jump in and write about it. However, the other day I came across something where I had to dig into python versioning with poetry. I thought you all would love to hear my thoughts on it. Because why else would you be here? Anyhoo, poetry.

So you know how a project has packages you’re going to use for it and those are your dependencies. And those packages have dependencies and keeping it all straight manually is a thing. So you use poetry to keep track of it all. You have a pyproject.toml file you can define your packages and the versions you need them to be. And then you’ve got your poetry.lock file that keeps track of all the packages and versions and tasty nuggets you have in your project.

My questions were:

  1. Can my poetry.lock file update itself by running poetry update without me having updated my package versions in pyproject.toml?
  2. When do i use poetry install versus poetry update?

What I discovered:

So if you update poetry without updating your pyproject.toml file, it is possible for poetry.lock to update itself. Here is why. It depends on what versions you have defined. So say you have version ^1.2.3 defined for a package and the package version you’re running is 1.2.3. If that package comes out with another patched version, say 1.2.5, your pipfile.lock would update because it falls into the requirements you defined (versions >=1.2.3 and <2.0.0)

The next question is answered in their documentation (shocker, I know. Who would have thought reading the documentation would yield results?) Anyhoo, poetry install installs the versions you have defined in your poetry.lock file and doesn’t do any resolving. Whereas, poetry update resolves the latest dependencies and updates the poetry.lock file. So it’s like running poetry lock (locks your dependencies from pyproject.toml) and then poetry install but doing it with one command.

Overall an interesting topic. Do you use poetry for package dependencies?

More next time!

Rachel