In my mid-20s—okay, mid- to late-20s—I worked as the Assistant Manager of a restaurant. It was a formative time for me, though I didn’t fully realize it then.

In 2015 I jotted down three managerial principles on Medium that had been percolating in my mind. (Medium at the time was quite in-vogue). Having forgotten all about this account, I stumbled upon it and it struck me as uncharacteristically good advice from my otherwise uninformed young self.

The following is dated May 10, 2015.

I keep three things in mind on a day to day basis that help me decide on a particular course of action, how best to conduct myself in a given situation, or where to focus my energy where demand outstrips supply.

1. As a leader, your most critical function is teaching and supporting your people. You are not your business — your employees are, and your job is to develop them into strong ambassadors of the brand. The quality of your product, the happiness of your customers, the volume of your sales all follow from the attitude and competence of your staff. Interpersonal skills and the ability to make improvements and criticisms without being hurtful or discouraging are perhaps the most critical attribute of any manager. Positive feedback is important.
2. Organization and prioritization. Simply find a way to ensure that no details are missed and nothing slips through the cracks. Do what you can to minimize surprises; be flexible and adaptable when they do occur.
3. Managing your own attitude. You set the tone and energy. I work in a fast-paced, high stress business where this is particularly important. Letting small incidents send you into an outwardly visible tailspin is a quick and sure way of crashing a complex or time-sensitive operation. Your staff feed off your energy and positivity, and being mindful of that is critically important. A friend once told me, “head to work each day as if you were going to war.” — Expect and anticipate problems in a manner such that they won’t ruin your day when they occur. Keep it light and save the over reactions for incidents that warrant it.

Along with hard work and volition, these three points seem to work well for me. I’m still young and stupid, so take with a dash of salt.

Will update as I make more mistakes and learn from them.

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Bonus: I also wrote this, titled reviews_cometh.txt :

The customers grow restless in the evenings. They arrive in numbers by moonlight and street lamp, hungry for bread and wine. It is in these hours, as dusk comes ever sooner with each revolution, they wait.

At the door, they wait.

For drinks, they wait.

For their meat and their honey…

They wait.

In these desperate moments — moments of hope then anger, denial then acceptance, they reach upon their mobile devices and tap.

For the negative reviews cometh.

# Make a clone of the repository
git clone <your_project> <new_submodule>

# CD into the new repository
cd <new_submodule>

# Use filter-branch to isolate the subdirectory
git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter 'path/to/subdirectory' --prune-empty -- --all

# Remove the old remote
git remote rm <remote_name>

git filter-branch lets you rewrite Git revision history and apply custom filters on each revision. It should be used with caution! From the Git Manual (emphasis mine):

git filter-branch has a plethora of pitfalls that can produce non-obvious manglings of the intended history rewrite (and can leave you with little time to investigate such problems since it has such abysmal performance). These safety and performance issues cannot be backward compatibly fixed and as such, its use is not recommended .

Nevertheless, since we live dangerously around these parts, here’s what’s happening with the filter-branch command should you choose to use it:

• --subdirectory-filter is the main command. It takes a path to a subdirectory and filters the repository to only include that subdirectory.
• --prune-empty removes commits that don’t change anything.
• -- --all is a way to pass arguments to the internal git rev-list command. In this case, it’s telling git to run the command on all branches.

Once the operation is done, you’ll have a new repository with only the subdirectory you specified. You can then push it to a new remote and add it as a submodule to your original repository.

git filter-branch is a destructive operation. While I’ve used the above command with success on my own repositories, your mileage may vary and I probably can’t help you if something goes wrong.

Jürgen Gmach on his personal blog:

While I need to use GPG pretty regularly, I always have to look up the commands - they just don’t stick :-)

Over the last couple of months I collected every command I had to use. Enjoy!

🔖 One for the bookmarks: GPG - All I Need to Know

For posterity: archive.today webpage capture

This snippet goes in your .vscode/tasks.json file. It will run the current python file as the default build task.

• command will invoke the python interpreter that is configured in your workspace settings.
• group will make this task the default build task.
• presentation:focus will focus the terminal window when the task is run.
• presentation:reveal will reveal the terminal window when the task is run.

Change args to any python file if you’d like to run the same file each time.

{
  // See https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=733558
  // for the documentation about the tasks.json format
  "version": "2.0.0",
  "tasks": [
    {
      "label": "Python: current file",
      "type": "shell",
      "command": "${command:python.interpreterPath}",
      "args": ["${file}"],
      "problemMatcher": [],
      "group": {
        "kind": "build",
        "isDefault": true
      },
      "presentation": {
        "focus": true,
        "reveal": "always"
      },
      "options": {
        "cwd": "${workspaceFolder}"
      }
    }
  ]
}

I owe a debt of gratitude to Claudio Jolowicz for introducing me to modern python tooling. His Hypermodern Python template and associated blog series are a great resource.

The Hypermodern system is built around nox and poetry .

• nox is similar in spirit to tox but uses python scripts instead of configuration files.
• It’s very powerful, but since I’m not particularly clever, I find the hypermodern stack difficult to understand.

I decided to throw together a simple template that uses tox and pip-tools. The template uses:

• pytest and coverage.py for testing,
• black for formatting, and
• ruff for linting.

It strives to be clean, simple and hard to break, albeit incomplete and likely suitable only for small libraries without broad distribution.

🌱 The template is available here: bulletproof-python .

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Note: The original version of this post incorrectly stated that Poetry does not play nice with pip-installs from git source. This is not the case; I simply had my pyproject.toml file incorrectly configured to use setuptools instead of poetry-core as the build backend.