G
Glyph
blog.glyph.im · Personal blog · on HN since 2022
Glyph Lefkowitz, a Python and Twisted developer, writes about Python practices, software design, security, and tech culture.
What HN saysCommenters cite his advice on installing Python on Mac, dataclasses, and type checking, and treat his posts as practical Python guidance.
39HN people shared it
4linked it in comments
76stories submitted
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4 months agolast shared
2022people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1I'm not going to cryptographically sign my Git commits, and you shouldn't either4 people · 50 points · first shared 2024 · 33 comments on HN
- 2Stop Writing `__init__` Methods4 people · 30 points · first shared 2025 · 6 comments on HN
- 3The Futzing Fraction4 people · 18 points · first shared 2025 · 1 comments on HN
- 4Against Innovation Tokens4 people · 14 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 5The Federation Deathmatch4 people · 6 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 6Deciphering Glyph: A Bigger Database4 people · 6 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 7The Next Thing Will Not Be Big4 people · 4 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 8Get your Mac Python from python.org4 people · 3 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 9I think I'm done thinking about GenAI for now3 people · 232 points · first shared 2025 · 126 comments on HN
- 10Dates and Times and Types3 people · 7 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 11Safer, Not Later3 people · 5 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 12Building and Distributing a macOS Application Written in Python (2023)3 people · 5 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 13What Is Code Review For?3 people · 4 points · first shared 2026 · 4 comments on HN
- 14What you've got is in fact a people problem2 people · 271 points · first shared 2024 · 124 comments on HN
- 15The Best Line Length2 people · 44 points · first shared 2025 · 51 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
Qem · 2026-06-08
> If you are going to be super-strict with type-checking, wouldn’t it be best to switch to a statically typed language and get the performance gains as well?
You can use type-checking to get better performance already, without leaving Python. See https://blog.glyph.im/2022/04/you-should-compile-your-python-and-heres…
emmelaich · 2024-09-03
Relatedly, this seems to be the best advice for installing and using Python on t he Mac. Probably applies to Windows as well.
https://blog.glyph.im/2023/08/get-your-mac-python-from-python-dot-org.…
rtpg · 2026-04-22
Are you writing code that gets reviewed by other people? Were code reviews hard in the past? Do your coworkers care about "code quality" (I mean this in scare quotes because that means different things to different people).
Are you working more on operational stuff or on "long-running product" stuff?
My personal headcanon: this tooling works well when built on simple patterns, and can handle complex work. This tooling has also been not great at coming up with new patterns, and if left unsupervised will totally make up new patterns that are going to go south very quickly. With that lens, I find myself just rewriting what Claude gives me in a good number of cases.
I sometimes race the robot and beat the robot at doing a change. I am "cheating" I guess cuz I know what I want already in many cases and it has to find things first but... I think the futzing fraction[0] is underestimated for some people.
And like in the "perils of laziness lost"[1] essay... I think that sometimes the machine trying too hard just offends my sensibilities. Why are you doing 3 things instead of just doing the one thing!
One might say "but it fixes it after it's corrected"... but I already go through this annoying "no don't do A,B, C just do A, yes just that it's fine" flow when working with coworkers, and it's annoying there too!
"Claude writes thorough tests" is also its own micro-mess here, because while guided test creation works very well for me, giving it any leeway in creativity leads to…
fbdab103 · 2023-09-02
You reminded me of this article[0] where the author asks why not dataclasses by default? I am inclined to agree, dataclasses feel Pythonic in that they remove boilerplate with reasonable defaults (sorting, hashing, etc).
[0] https://blog.glyph.im/2023/02/data-classification.html