Entries tagged 'Frozen Soup'

I’m still looking for a job.

It is a new month, so I thought it was a good time to raise this flag again, despite it being a bad day to try and be honest and earnest on the internet.

I wish I was the sort of organized that allowed me to run down statistics of how many jobs I have applied to and how many interviews I have gone through other than to say it has been a lot and very few.

Last month I decided to start (re)developing my Python skills because that seems to be much more in demand than the PHP skills I can more obviously lay claim to. I made some contributions to an open source project, ArchiveBox: improving the importing tools, writing tests, and updating it to the latest LTS version of Django from the very old version it was stuck on. I also started putting together a Python library/tool to create a single-file version of an HTML file by pulling in required external resources and in-lining them; my way of learning more about the Python culture and ecosystem.

That and attending SCALE 21x really did help me realize how much I want to be back in the open source development space. I am certainly not dogmatic about it, but I believe to my bones that operating in a community is the best way to develop software.

I think my focus this month has to be on preparing for the “technical interview” exercises that are such a big of the tech hiring process these days, as much as I hate it. I think what makes me a valuable senior engineer is not that I can whip up code on demand for data structures and algorithms, but that I know how to put systems together, have a broader business experience that means I have a deeper of understanding of what matters, and can communicate well. But these tests seem to be an accepted and expected component of the interview process now, so it only makes sense to polish those skills.

(Every day this drags on, I regret my detour into opening a small business more. That debt is going to be a drag on the rest of my life, compounded by the huge weird hole it puts in my résumé.)

Frozen Soup, my Python library/tool for creating a single-file version of an HTML page got another release that adds handling of <base> and specifying selectors to knock out.

This is another one where I had to re-do the release because of something dumb. This time it was forgetting to bump the version in pyproject.toml. I should look into how to have it automatically figure that out from the tag during release.

Monolith is another project like this that is written in Rust.

One of the benefits of starting Frozen Soup from a project template is that someone very smart (Simon) has done all the heavy lifting to make publishing it into the Python ecosystem really easy to do. So after I added a new feature today (pulling in external url(...) references in CSS inline as data: URLs), I went ahead and registered the project on PyPI, tagged the release on GitHub, and let the GitHub Actions that were part of the project template do the work of publishing the release. It worked on the first try, which is lovely.

I pushed more changes after I did that release, adding a way to set timeouts and fixing the first issue (that I also filed) about pre-existing data: URLs getting mangled. I also added a quick-and-dirty server version which allows for getting the single-file HTML version of a page, and makes it a little easier to play around with the single-file version of live URLs without having to deal with saving and opening the files.

So I did a second release.

I made a new thing, which I decided to call Frozen Soup. It creates a single-file version of an HTML page by in-lining all of the images using data: URLs, and pulling in any CSS and JavaScript files.

It is loosely inspired by SingleFile which is a browser extension that does a similar thing. There are also tools built on top of that which let you automate it, but then you’re spinning up a headless browser, and it all felt very heavyweight. The venerable wget will also pull down a page and its prerequisites and rewrite the URLs to be relative, but I don’t think it has a comparable single-file output.

This may also exist in other incarnations, this is mostly an excuse for me to practice with Python. As such, it is a very crude first draft right now, but I hope to keep tinkering with it for at least a little while longer.

I have also been contributing some changes and test cases to ArchiveBox, but this is different yet also a little related.